Each year on the fourth of July America celebrates Independence Day, the birthday of our nation. On July 4, 1776, representatives of the original states signed the Declaration of Independence. This central document of American history, which has been called our nation’s birth certificate, is the foundational document of our country. It espouses the foundational truths or principles upon which our country was founded.
Beginning in the 1960s, the foundational truths laid by the Declaration of Independence have been incrementally and systematically pulled out from under our nation. Today, none remain; America’s foundations are destroyed. Our nation is therefore beyond repair. There is nothing we can do to save America; America’s inevitable collapse is assured.
I can already hear the rising chorus of condemnation leveled against me for being so pessimistic and unpatriotic. Many will insist that the church must not give up on America. They will undoubtedly attempt to use the words of Christ, “With God all things are possible,” to contradict my contentions. Ironically, these famous words of our Lord recorded in Matthew 19:26 and Mark 10:27 were not uttered in reference to the salvation of nations, but in reference to the salvation of souls, which is the sole task to which Christ has commissioned His church (Matthew 28:18-20).
Am I arguing against the church’s role as the salt of the earth or against God’s ability to miraculously save America? Of course not! The church is the salt of the earth, as Jesus taught in Matthew 5:13. As the salt of the earth, the church should work to preserve society by acting as the conscience of the country. However, having slept on its watch until our country has become reprobate (a point I will prove later in this article), it is now too late for a discarded and disrespected American church, one generally regarded as “good for nothing” and consequently “cast out and…trodden under foot of men,” to exert any influence over a conscience-seared society.
In spite of our sin-ridden society’s scoffing and snickering at an American church that has lost its “savour” or saltiness, many will still take me to task for not holding out hope of America’s salvation via means of divine intervention. Like any sinner miraculously saved by God’s grace, I am acutely aware of God’s ability to perform the impossible. Therefore, I readily admit that God could miraculously save America. This admission does nothing, however, to detract from my contention that there’s nothing we can do to save America. If America is to survive, only God can save it! All the church can do is pray, seek God’s face, and turn from its wicked ways (2 Chronicles 7:14). God alone can heal our land.
What are the foundational truths upon which our nation was founded, truths that have been methodically dislodged from our nation’s foundation over the last few decades? Let’s turn to our nation’s foundational document and see if we can glean from it the bedrock principles advocated by our Founding Fathers and abandoned by today’s America. The Declaration of Independence begins with these words:
“When, in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the Causes which impel them to the Separation.
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men…”
America’s first foundational truth to be destroyed is the truth of truth itself. Our Founding Fathers believed in “truths” that were “self-evident.” Today’s America no longer believes in truth, especially self-evident, obvious, or absolute truth. Instead, today’s America has bought into the lie of relativism.
Relativism is the belief that all truth is relative; that is, it is in a constant state of flux. Truth is always changing. It changes from time to time and from person to person. What is truth today may not have been truth yesterday and what is truth today may not still be truth tomorrow. Furthermore, what is truth to me may not be truth to you and what is truth to us may not be truth to others. This ever-changing truth of relativism forces us to an inevitable conclusion; namely, there is no such thing as absolute truth. Nothing is right or wrong anymore; nothing is true or false. Every opinion is equally valid and none are superior or inferior to others.
Anyone daring to deny today’s relativism is immediately and unmercifully condemned as intolerant. Intolerance is an interesting word. It used to mean denying everyone an equal right to their opinion. When I was growing up, I was taught that everyone had a right to their opinion, even if they were wrong. Today, however, intolerance no longer means denying everyone an equal right to their opinion. Instead, intolerance now means denying that every opinion is equally right.
In America today you can believe anything you want to believe, just as long as you don’t really believe it. Christians can believe in Christ, just as long as we acknowledge that our belief in Christ is no better than a New Ager’s belief in a crystal, a Native American’s belief in a totem pole, an occultist’s belief in a Ouija Board, or some environmentalist out in the woods hugging on a tree stump. If we dare to declare our belief in Christ not only superior, but alone true and all other beliefs false, then we’ll immediately find ourselves facing the ire of relativism’s irate American adherents.
No longer is America founded on rock-solid foundational truths. Indeed, America no longer believes in truth at all. Today’s America stands on the ever-shifting sands of personal whims, passing fads, and fickle public opinion. While we may still boast of being the world’s showcase sandcastle, our erosion by the high tides of the end times will become increasingly undeniable as we sink deeper and deeper into the quicksand of relativism.
America’s second foundational truth to be destroyed is the truth of creation. Our Founding Fathers believed “that all men are created equal.” Today’s America no longer believes in creation, but in evolution. As a consequence, we no longer believe in the equality of all men, despite all of our claims to the contrary. Instead, we are now adherents to natural selection—the survival of the fittest. Since evolution is fundamentally the belief that the fitter or superior are naturally predisposed to survive at the expense of the less fit or inferior, it is impossible for evolutionists to believe in the equality of all men. How can all men be equal if some are fitter than others? Any evolutionist claiming to believe in the equality of all men is putting himself in the untenable position of self-contradiction.
Not far from where I was raised in East Tennessee is the town of Dayton, the site of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. This legendary court case resulted in a high school biology teacher by the name of John Scopes being convicted of the crime of teaching the theory of evolution in a Tennessee public school. At the time of the trial, Darwin’s theory of natural selection was forbidden from being taught in the public schools of Tennessee by the Butler Act. The Butler Act simply stated: "That it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals [Teachers Colleges] and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals."
Tennessee’s Butler Act is long gone from today’s America. Today, rather than banning theories that deny the Biblical story of creation, it is the Biblical story of creation alone that is forbidden from being taught to children in our public school classrooms. Having outlawed school prayer, banned the Bible from the classroom, and expunged the Genesis account of creation from all public school curriculums, America has effectively expelled God from its public schools. In spite of doing so, America still wonders why today’s public school teachers worry about school shootings, whereas yesterday’s only concerned themselves with such things as students talking in class, getting out of line, running in the halls, or chewing gum.
In today’s America, public school teachers are forbidden from teaching children about the Incarnation—that God became a man in the man Christ Jesus—but forced to teach children about evolution—that a monkey became a man. In today’s America, public school teachers are forbidden from teaching children the Genesis account of creation—“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”—but forced to teach children the cockamamie theory of evolution—that everything, including you, me, and a head of cabbage, come from the same single cell that floated up on a slimy beach eons and eons ago. In today’s America, public school teachers are forbidden from teaching children that an intricately designed universe has an intelligent Designer, but forced to teach children that an intricately designed universe has no intelligent designer. In today’s America, public school teachers are forbidden from teaching children that only a fool would say that there is no God (Psalm 14:11; 53:1), but forced to teach children that it takes a genius to say that there is no God.
For years now America’s public schools have been indoctrinating our children to believe that the universe is a cosmic accident, that man is the mere product of natural selection, that life has no purpose, and that nothing lies beyond this meaningless existence. Far from instilling in our future generation the foundational truth of all men being created equal, we’ve doomed our nation by brainwashing our posterity into seeing themselves as nothing more than primates pitted against each other in a cruel contest for survival of the fittest. With nothing but survival to aspire to, our kids have no qualms about sinking to the depths of depravity or employing any dastardly means to enhance their existence at the expense of others. How can any nation reduced to such a dog-eat-dog mentality much longer endure?
America’s third foundational truth to be destroyed is the truth of God. Our Founding Fathers unapologetically acknowledged their belief in “Nature's God.” Furthermore, they unequivocally stated that the government they were founding was founded on the basic premise that “all Men are…endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” According to our Founding Fathers, “governments are instituted” in order “to secure these [God-given and irrevocable] rights [of men].” Any government that ceases to perform its role as guarantor of its people’s unalienable rights is a government that the people should “alter or abolish,” as our Founding Fathers emphatically exclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.
In 1954, during the Cold War, the United States Congress attempted to contrast the difference between communist governments and ours by adding the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. Communism is based on atheism; therefore, it views the state as supreme. Since communists believe that there is no God, they inevitably conclude that the state is supreme and the sole arbiter of human rights. In communist countries, men’s rights are not viewed as God-given, but as government-granted. Thus, the government, which is seen as the grantor of human rights, is also granted the power to revoke men’s rights. In communist lands, the government alone determines who has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as well as who doesn’t.
Our government, unlike communist governments, is based on a belief in God. God is therefore seen as supreme and the sole arbiter of human rights. Nothing, including the state, can dare to usurp the place of God and revoke the unalienable rights of men. Since our rights are God-given, not government-granted, our government has no right to revoke them. Instead, it exists for the sole purpose of protecting and preserving them. If it ever ceases to guarantee and guard our unalienable rights, we the people have ever right to overthrow it; otherwise, we will become mere subjects of a tyrannical government.
On June 26, 2002, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance was “unconstitutional.” Ironically, by striking down the Pledge as unconstitutional and by ruling in favor of a California atheist by the name of Michael Newdow, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the very thing that the phrase “under God” was inserted into the Pledge to combat; namely, atheism—the basis for godless communism. While one would expect this kind of ruling from a communist court, like the Standing Committee of the National People’s Republic of China, it comes as quite a shock from an American Appeals Court. Not only did this loony, left-coast court’s ruling fly in the face of our Founding Fathers, but it also undermined our founding document and pulled from beneath our nation the bedrock principle upon which it was founded.
Many take solace in the fact that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals was eventually overturned by the United States Supreme Court on June 14, 2004. Yet, I find little comfort in this, since the Supreme Court refused to decide the issue and opted instead to overturn the 9th Circuit on a technicality. The Supreme Court ended up throwing the case out. It found that Michael Newdow had no legal standing to bring it, since he did not have legal custody of his daughter and since his daughter had no objection to saying the Pledge. What does it say about today’s judiciary when a case has to get all of the way to the United States Supreme Court before it’s figured out that the case should have been thrown out of court to start with? Far from taking solace in this, I find myself scared to death by it.
Adding insult to injury, Justice Sandra Day O’Conner took it upon herself to proffer a voluntary opinion on Newdow’s illegal suit and the 9th Circuit Court’s ridiculous ruling. According to O’Conner, the phrase “one nation under God” in the Pledge is not unconstitutional because “our continued repetition” of it has reduced it to a “ceremonial deism.” O’Conner went on to argue that “any religious [meaning] the words may have meant to carry originally has long since been lost.” In other words, O’Conner said it’s okay to acknowledge God in today’s America as long as we don’t mean anything by it.
It sounds to me like Sandra Day O’Conner believes that the only time it’s lawful to acknowledge God is when we do so in violation of God’s law, in particularly of the 3rd Commandment—“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” Apparently, O’Conner believes that it’s legal for America’s school children to continue saying the Pledge as long as they’re taking God’s name in vain and not speaking it in reverence. Likewise, it’s okay for today’s public school children to use God’s name in profanity, but never in prayer, which, of course, our courts outlawed from our public schools some time ago.
The same Supreme Court that punted Newdow’s case out of court, refused to even hear the appeal of Judge Roy Moore. Judge Moore, the former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was removed from office because of his refusal to remove a 2 ½ tons monument of the Ten Commandments from the Alabama Supreme Court Judicial Building. Ordered to remove the monument by a lone lower court judge, Myron Thompson, Moore refused, citing the facts that Judge Thompson’s ruling lacked legal foundation and contradicted the constitution of the state of Alabama. According to Judge Moore, a government that is based on its acknowledgement of God not only has the right, but the obligation to acknowledge God; and any court that attempts to forbid government officials from doing so has neither the authority nor the constitutional prerogative to step so far out of bounds.
Interestingly, eight days after refusing to hear Judge Moore’s case, a case that attracted national attention and divided the nation, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two other Ten Commandments cases, one brought by a homeless man who claimed to be offended every time he passed a granite monument of the Ten Commandments on his way to the public library. Why would the Supreme Court agree to hear these other two cases—Van Orden v. Perry and ACLU v. McCreary County—but refuse to hear Judge Moore’s, a case of national interest, not to mention national repercussions? Could it be the fact that these other cases, unlike Judge Moore’s, which asserted the government’s right and obligation to acknowledge God, were being defended on the basis that the Ten Commandments displays in question were merely historical or secular?
For years now our courts have ruled that it is unlawful for our government to acknowledge God. Despite the indefensibility of such an absurdity—a government founded upon its acknowledgement of God being forbidden by its courts from doing so—our courts have preserved an appearance of decorum by ducking behind the argument that acknowledgments of God are permissible as long as they are purely secular. In other words, Ten Commandments monuments are lawful as long as they are intended to be historical and not religious. If, however, the Supreme Court had agreed to hear Judge Moore’s case, our Supreme Court Justices would have had nothing to hide behind. They would have been forced to fly their true colors. They would have found themselves in the untenable position of either overturning themselves or declaring every government acknowledgement of God unconstitutional, from the Declaration of Independence to the Supreme Court’s own opening: “God save the United States and this honorable court.”
According to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the reason behind the Supreme Court’s cherry picking of Ten Commandments cases and inconsistency in deciding them—there were eight opinions from nine justices in the two Ten Commandments cases the Court agreed to hear after refusing to hear Judge Moore’s case—is the Court’s “instinct for self-preservation.” Recognizing that it “has no influence over either the sword [executive branch] or the purse [legislative branch],” Scalia argues that the Supreme Court “cannot go too far” in contradicting “both historical fact and current practice without losing all that sustains it: the willingness of the people to accept its interpretation of the Constitution as definitive.” Undoubtedly, the Supreme Court would lose the public’s trust if it ever brazenly came out and found the Founding Fathers in violation of the separation of church and state, ruled the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional, and ordered all references to God sandblasted from all government buildings and monuments. Thus, like the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Supreme Court of Jesus’ day, America’s present-day Supreme Court Justices carefully conceal their hostility toward Christ and all things Christian in order to protect their place and fool the public into standing and submitting every time the Court’s gavel is heard (John 11:47-53).
Apparently, Judge Myron Thompson is far less concerned about the public’s confidence in today’s judiciary than are our Supreme Court Justices. In ordering Judge Roy Moore to remove his Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama Supreme Court Judicial Building, Judge Thompson daringly ruled that “the state may not acknowledge the sovereignty of the Judeo-Christian God and attribute to that God our religious freedom.” Contrary to Judge Thompson’s ruling, Thomas Jefferson, the architect of the Declaration of Independence, insisted that “the liberties of [our] nation” can never be “secure” if “we remove their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift from God.” Unlike Judge Thompson and his ilk, Jefferson understood that any government that fails to acknowledge God will soon usurp the place of God and any people who forget God will soon forfeit their unalienable rights by subjecting themselves to a tyrannical government.
Forbidden by our courts from acknowledging God, our government is now usurping the place of God. It is making itself into the arbiter of our rights. It is deciding who has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For instance, according to our government, unborn children have no right to life because liberated women have the right to selfishly pursue their own happiness by terminating any unwanted pregnancy with an abortion. A government that has no qualms about stripping unborn children of their right to life can never be trusted to protect and preserve our right to life, much less our rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For anyone who doubts this, I have just two words: Terri Schiavo.
How can a government founded upon its acknowledgment of God survive once its courts have outlawed its acknowledgment of God? As President Ronald Reagan once warned, “If we ever forget that we are a nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.” Having put God out of sight and out of mine, America is a nation quickly running out of time.
The Bible says that those who acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord will be saved and that those who refuse to do so are lost (Romans 10:9-10). If this is so, then how lost is a nation that not only refuses to acknowledge Jesus Christ, but outlaws its acknowledgments of Him? Truly, such a nation is not only lost, but reprobate. This is the dire and desperate spiritual straits of today’s America, a nation whose foundations are destroyed and whose collapse appears inevitable.
Don Walton
