How could Nancy Pelosi falsely accuse Americans, who exercise their free speech rights, of carrying swastikas to town hall meetings implying they are Nazis? Why is the man sitting in the Oval Office more divisive than any in the history of our country? What has caused the political discourse, on both sides of the political spectrum, to become so rabid union thugs, police officers, and volunteers are attending town hall meetings to provide “security”?

Simply this: America is off course. And by a long shot.

Historians can look back to the Adams/Jefferson presidential race and the Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans political factions and say we are no worse than at the turn of the 19th Century. Perhaps in political discourse things are not much different, but we are indeed a different people.

We are a people without national virtue.

We are a people who have come to accept as the norm the postmodern thinking of “what is right for you is not necessarily right for me”; meaning there is no absolute truth. Without absolute truth, there is no morality ruler. In Understanding Evangelicals: A Guide to Jesusland this writer wrote:

It’s really quite a simple concept. When you have and agree with a fundamental standard to live by, outside of your personal opinion, you can actually determine whether something is right or wrong. Why? Because…absolute truth is something that is true at all times, to all people, everywhere. It’s like having a morality ruler; you can measure truth with it.

If there is no absolute truth then there is no chance for virtue. Random House Dictionary defines virtue as “moral excellence; goodness; righteousness.” Can America be a virtuous nation if we cannot agree on moral excellence, goodness, and righteousness? Without virtue America cannot last as its Founders envisioned.

President John Adams, while addressing the military, stated:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Historians would be hard-pressed to find a time when avarice, ambition, or revenge were more misguided and unabated than today. Some would say that is the outcome of the free market system. The free market system is no more responsible for the societal greed than your television set is responsible for the filth it displays. To blame America’s greed on the capitalist system is the same tortuous logic that says guns are responsible for criminals and murderers using guns.

So where is the problem? It is with the citizen. We the People are the problem. While Barack Obama tried to tell America that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for”, in actuality we are the problem we are trying to fix.

In the never-ending assault on religion and morality, primarily Christianity, America has set itself so far off course that it is almost impossible to imagine the country ever righting itself.

Writing on the subject of morality in Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis reminds us:

Remember that religion involves a series of statements about facts, which must be either true or false. If they are true, one set of conclusions will follow about the right sailing of the human fleet: if they are false, quite a different set…Again, Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever, and this must be either true or false…if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilization, compared with his, is only a moment.

Traditional evangelicals have been accused of being single issue voters and having a litmus test when it comes to abortion. This is absolutely true and no less required. If C.S. Lewis is right, that the “individual is not only more important but incomparably more important”, then is not the life of an unborn baby more important then the life of a political party or a nation for that matter?

Would not a God as described in the Holy Bible look at a nation that wantonly and willfully murders nearly 4,000 unborn babies each day and judge it as unworthy of His name? Would not this same God feel mocked every time our currency is passed or the Pledge of Allegiance is cited?

Too many Americans, regardless their political stripe, believe that “the life of the (American) state or (western) civilization is not only more important but incomparably more important” than the individual.

The fact that in the current health care reform debate the question of providing end of life treatment is something the government can decide shows how far off course the human fleet has veered. The Apostle Paul declared that it is “God who gives life to all things” (1 Timothy 6:13a). So if the Apostle Paul and the Bible are to be believed, what are we doing as a nation determining who shall live or die? That is not even an individual choice much less a governmental one.

If the life of an individual be it unborn, indigent, elderly, incapacitated, or wonderfully blessed cannot be considered more important than a cause, a political party, or a country for that matter, then totalitarianism is the inevitable outcome. The collective now becomes more important than the individual.

America’s ship was once called Liberty. Today it is being renamed Community. The rudder driving Community is moral relativism. The sails of Liberty were once known as virtue, responsibility, and industry. Today the sails of Community are called entitlement, hope, and change. And this ship with its unsure rudder and undefined sails is without a moral compass.

The aggressive nature of the postmodernists is worse than mutineers trying to overtake a ship. The moral relativists corrupting American society are like an unstoppable contagion of “ship fever” bringing a level of depression and delirium to its inhabitants incapable of being sedated or satiated.

John Adams at the wise age of seventy-five wrote:

Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not only of republicanism and of all free government, but of social felicity under all governments and in all the combinations of human society.

Nearly two hundred years later these words ring truer than when they were first penned. Adams’ words bring a hunger to the heart of this writer; a yearning not for the days of old but for a realization that the Promised Land Americans think they see on the horizon is a cruel mirage.

The Grand Land of Hope and Change is nothing more than history’s Lorelei siren song calling another civilization to crash on the unforgiving rocks of earthly utopia.

Unless the sailors, once known as citizens, of this human fleet called the United States come to its senses and right its course, a righting caused by a return to Christian virtue, then America will sail over the falls of Shangri-La, never to be heard from again.

Copyright © 2009 David Jeffers.
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