What Happened in America?
- Apr 7, 2009 -
When I was in my early twenties, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States. I was a young U.S. Air Force officer, and I remember thinking that God was moving this country in the right direction. The economy began to grow, and our military grew to be the most powerful on earth. It seemed like the fight for abortion was in full tilt and that Southern Baptists and Evangelicals had a strong and growing influence on not only our political leaders, but on the country as a whole. Now I am fifty years old, and in spite of our continued efforts, things have gone awry. So I have to ask, “What happened in America?”
Today, things are not moving in the right direction. Our economy is, frankly, rather scary. We have a thirteen trillion dollar (and growing) national debt. Because of everything that has happened with sub-prime home loans, we find that we may be in a fifty-year or one-hundred-year economic storm. Most analysts believe the other shoe has not dropped yet, which means that we can expect things to get worse before they get better.
The last administration and this one are trying to deal with these economic problems by moving toward socialism. Since socialism has never worked at any other place and time, we have no good reason to believe that it will work here and now. Government bailouts are increasing our national debt. Since the Chinese already hold two trillion dollars of our debt and the Saudis hold one trillion dollars of our debt, they may not want to buy more. If the government resorts to printing money, that will result in inflation and threaten to destabilize the U.S. dollar.
Combine all of these economic woes with a new presidential administration that does not see the war with Islamic terrorists for what it is, a fight for the survival of Western culture and religious liberty. To make matters worse, by all accounts this administration appears committed to expanding abortion rights and extending a privileged class status to homosexuals and lesbians. All in all, this is a rather upsetting state of affairs, which causes me to wonder, “What happened?”
The truth of the matter is that it was no one thing, but rather a number of things. As a result of our fascination with material things, we began to let our morality slip. The popular media had a large hand in this. Since many of the people who work in the media see nothing wrong with abortion and homosexuality and most of them do not attend church on a regular basis, it should come as no surprise that they have stopped reporting the news and have merely gotten into the propaganda business.
Aldous Huxley explained this propaganda in his Brave New World Revisited: “Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty.”
Huxley further explained that mass communication “in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used for either well or ill. Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensible to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are the most powerful weapons in the dictator’s armory. In the field of mass communication as in almost every other field of enterprise, technological progress has hurt the Little Man and helped the Big Man.”
The media is not to be blamed alone. The revivalist Leonard Ravenhill used to say that “some have said that the church is suffering for the sins of America, but the truth is that America is suffering for the sins of the church.” He was right; America is suffering for the sins of the church. We have forgotten that what is most important is eternal and not temporal. Too many churches have become worldly, prayerless and scripturally illiterate. As a result, we have created a Jesus of our making, one who is tolerant of sin and does not threaten with eternal damnation.
First John 2:15 tells us to love not the world. James 4 tells us that to be a friend of the world is to be an enemy of God. But it increasingly appears that many preachers and churchgoers want to be “cool” and “with it.” In other words, they would rather be liked by the world than try to walk counter to it. The New Testament writers understood that the “world” is that system of fallen angelic powers that pulls men away from God and His truth. That is why believers are called out of the world, to be different from it. We have to live in this world, but we do not have to be part of it. Ten years ago George Barna reported in his book The Second Coming of the Church that most Christians in America live no differently than most people without Christ. Even though ten years have passed, I strongly doubt that things have changed for the better.
I propose that our lack of regard for God’s authority and His Word have led us to this place of worldly living and loss of evangelistic power. Is it any wonder that baptisms are down? The average church membership-per-baptism ratio was 42 church members per baptism, when a healthy church has a membership-to-baptism ratio of 20 members per baptism. The Southern Baptist Convention had 347,000 baptisms last year, and some fear that we soon may fall below 300,000 baptisms a year.
Our wealth and freedom have us trusting in the wrong things, like our financial system. We also trust in political parties, who only use us for our votes. Consequently, we don’t rely upon God the way that we should. This is the reason that we don’t pray the way that we should, because we trust in the things of this world rather than God.
It is time to make things right and refocus our activities toward what is spiritual and eternal rather than what is material and temporal. We serve and worship an eternal God who is trying to wake us up from our spiritual stupor. If America is ever to turn around and move in the right direction, then we who are believers need to focus on the things we can do to glorify our God, namely prayer and personal holiness and evangelism.
Let us pray for our leaders, live lives that will make the lost wonder why we live so differently from everyone else, and try to reach those lost with the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ! If we do these things, we will help change America, one person at a time.
Craig Mitchell is assistant professor of Christian Ethics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
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