The Founding Fathers of the United States understood the teachings of Christianity even though they weren’t all followers of the religion. They agreed with the Bible that human beings are fundamentally flawed (i.e. corrupt, sinful) and so they designed a government that would keep the people’s worst instincts in check. This is why the United States is not a democracy but a republic, and there are three branches of government with a distinct separation of powers. The Founders realized that allowing a simple majority to always have its way would lead to a tyranny of the mob. Muscle testing reveals that 51 percent of the U.S. population has a level of consciousness below 200 and thus lacks integrity. Considering this, do you see how dangerous it would be to allow 51 percent of the population to pass any law it wanted?
The Electoral College and the Senate (two senators for each state regardless of the state’s population) are two important bulwarks against mob rule. The Electoral College forces a presidential candidate to create a national coalition in order to win (rather than just campaign in the most populous states and ignore the rest of the country) while the Senate gives less populous states more influence than they would otherwise have, and this means that passing a law usually requires getting votes from both sides of the political aisle (i.e. bipartisanship).
So while it would be incorrect to say that we have a Christian government, we certainly have a government that was inspired by Christianity and was designed for a Christian people. John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers, said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Unfortunately, many of the constraints designed to keep the federal government in check have gradually been removed.
Where did it all begin to go wrong?
An argument can be made that it began with a change in the voting laws. Originally, only property owners could vote. This not only prevented mob rule but also prevented radical ideas from getting any political traction, as people who own property are unlikely to support socialist ideas that favor seizing property or redistributing income.
The key to the long-term success and stability of any society is to keep its most radical elements in check. Not allowing everyone to vote is one of the surest ways to do this. Many people will recoil at the notion that allowing everyone to vote isn’t the absolute highest good, but it needs to be understood that democracy is not an end in itself. Democratic elections are simply a means to an end: The protection of individual liberty.
It was a gradual process, but eventually the voting laws were changed. By 1828, most states allowed all white men to vote regardless of whether they held property or not. By 1920, all women were given the right to vote as well. This was ratified in the Nineteenth Amendment.
Whatever positives universal suffrage has provided, it needs to be acknowledged that there have been serious negatives as well.
First, allowing everyone to vote has turned us into a more individualistic society. As of this writing, the United States is deeply divided with the Democratic party representing most female voters and the Republican party representing most male voters. Men and women are now pitted against each other politically, and this cannot be good for long-term social cohesion.
Second, universal suffrage has allowed envy to become a powerful political force. The Bible clearly warns against this destructive instinct. Envy first reared its ugly head with the passage of the Sixteen Amendment which allowed for the imposition of a federal income tax.
The income tax was initially promoted as a way to punish rich people who weren’t, as the tired cliché goes, “paying their fair share.” The income tax was sold on the notion that it would only apply to the top four percent of incomes. But, as the American people soon discovered, envy knows no bounds. The income tax was gradually expanded until it hit almost everyone. Before the income tax, Americans were among the lowest-taxed people in the entire world. Now, our standard of living has been dramatically reduced as at least twenty-five percent of our income is consumed by the federal government. Envy is truly one of the deadly sins.
But there was another downside to the income tax. The enormous amount of money it generated enabled the federal government to meddle in the lives of Americans to a degree that previously had never been possible. It was now able to engage in all kinds of corrupt social engineering that has made all of our lives worse. It was now able to create massive entitlements programs that, whatever their merits, have proven impossible to reform and now threaten to destroy the country’s financial solvency (and the country itself). That this happened should not be a surprise. History has shown that when you allow everyone to vote, the people will keep voting more and more benefits for themselves until it inevitably leads to a country’s bankruptcy and collapse.
The next disastrous move was the passing of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. This allowed for the direct election of senators. Previously, senators were chosen by the state governments. But now senators were no longer accountable to the state governments they represented, and this removed another restraint that was meant to keep the power of the federal government in check.
The Seventeenth Amendment was passed in the name of making our elections more democratic, but the Founding Fathers did not want this. They understood the danger of too much democracy. Given people’s corrupt nature, they knew this would inevitably push our politics in a more radical and dangerous direction.
The next blow came in 1917 when the Cloture rule passed. Previously, the U.S. Senate allowed unlimited debate on any bill. This meant that a single senator could block a vote from ever taking place. This prevented many bad laws from being passed. But the Cloture rule put an end to unlimited debate, and it was another crucial step that would allow the massive expansion of government that was to come in the 1930s with the New Deal.
I won’t go into detail about the New Deal. I will simply say that the creation of numerous government agencies in which “experts” would now manage the economy was another example of ignoring the corrupt nature of humanity that the Bible warns of. These agencies were designed to be unaccountable to the voters, and this unaccountability would allow greater government intrusion into every aspect of our lives. By every measure, the administrative state has strangled economic freedom and dramatically raised the cost of living.
Government intervention in the economy has led to one financial crisis after another, one of the most notable being the housing crisis of 2008. Did the government take responsibility for pressuring banks into making loans to minority groups regardless of whether those loans were likely to be repaid? Of course not. The political class blamed the banks for the financial crisis that it had created. Even worse, it used the crisis as an excuse to seize even more power for itself.
The belief in the infallibility of experts led to one of the most disastrous decisions in our country’s history: The shutting down of the entire economy in the wake of the 2020 COVID pandemic. Governors all over the country suddenly assumed dictatorial powers and shut our society completely down. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that our right to work and earn a living can be taken away in the event of a pandemic or any other emergency, yet this is exactly what happened. This ultimately led to trillions of dollars in new debt and massive inflation, yet there is little reason to believe that any lives were saved as a result.
In summary, it seems clear that the only way to keep the corrupt nature of humanity in check is to have a truly limited government where neither unaccountable “experts” nor the mob are able to have their way.
But the damage that has been done to our country is not just economic. We also need to discuss the collapse of marriage and the two-parent family. How did this happen? Again, it happened because we ignored what the Bible teaches.
It all started with the invention of the birth control pill. Its arrival was the equivalent of a nuclear bomb being dropped on the social order. Why? Because the pill now allowed people to easily engage in behavior that the Bible strictly forbids: Having sex out of wedlock.
Before the pill and legalized abortion, there was no way to control pregnancy. Because of this, women could not risk having multiple sexual partners since a pregnancy out of wedlock would ruin them (Men were not required to pay financial support for a baby born out of wedlock).
As a result, there was true “equity” in the sexual marketplace. This meant, to put it crudely, one per customer. Women could only have one sexual partner. And this gave everyone a fair chance at getting married.
But what about sexual freedom, you ask? Isn’t that a good thing?
Sexual freedom really only benefits the sexually powerful. It allows the alpha males to take most of the women for themselves. In other words, it allows the strong to trample the weak. The end result is a quasi-polygamous society in which most men get left out in the cold while most women get used and discarded.
Isn’t it telling that, in this new era of sexual freedom, there are actually far fewer people having sex than in the supposedly repressive era of the 1950s? More and more people are single and alone. Only the sexually powerful are able to thrive in this new Wild West that we have created. How ironic that the freedom to have sex with anyone you want is actually quite oppressive for the vast majority of people.
So while we now have more sexual freedom, few people actually benefit from it. And the tradeoff is that there is far less certainty. There is no longer a clear path to marriage as there once was, and there is no longer a guarantee that your spouse will stay with you. With so much uncertainty, is it really a surprise that so many people today are less happy than they were in the past? We have traded certainty for freedom, and more and more people are beginning to realize this was a very bad trade.
On top of all this, birth rates have fallen below replacement level not just in the United States but all over the world. God commands us all to marry and have children (Genesis 1:28), yet many people are simply refusing to do so. Either they don’t want to deal with the inconvenience of raising children or they aren’t willing to settle for a partner who is less than their imagined ideal. This refusal to obey the Bible threatens the existence of humanity itself.
Of course, we cannot complete discussion on the subject of sexual relations without talking about the complete gutting of the institution of marriage by allowing easy, “no-fault” divorce (It is worth noting that this disastrous change never would have happened if women had not been granted universal suffrage).
Jesus in the Bible forbids divorce. Yet we have adopted easy, no-fault divorce in the name of freedom. However, the freedom to break your marriage vow without proper cause is not a virtue. It is in fact a terrible betrayal (and it is long past time that it is recognized as such).
Our divorce laws are warped. They have created perverse incentives that encourage women to file for divorce (at least 80 percent are initiated by women) and encourage men not to get married at all since divorce usually results in men getting destroyed financially. Is it any surprise that marriage rates have collapsed and divorce rates have skyrocketed?
It took centuries to set up the institution of marriage which formed the bedrock of Western civilization and was instrumental to its ascendency and prosperity, yet it took only a few short years to destroy it. And all because we thought we knew better than Jesus. I will discuss how this can be reversed in the next article.
Our culture wars began due to the rise of radical left ideology in the 1960s. It promoted the victim-perpetrator model of the world which holds that everyone falls into one of two groups: victims or perpetrators. This overly simplistic view of reality is false, but it has been adopted by a substantial percentage of the population. A more recent derivative of this idea is critical race theory which holds that all white people are, if not overtly, then unconsciously racist.
Jesus warned against this:
Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the beam that is in your own eye? Or how will you tell your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye;’ and behold, the beam is in your own eye? You hypocrite! First remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:3-5)
The message here is clear. We should each fix our own flaws before seeking out flaws in others. For none of us are perfect human beings. The desire to blame entire groups of people for society’s problems has caused us to pit one group against another in what will be a never-ending battle unless and until this destructive ideology is finally cast aside.
Another destructive ideology is DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) which pushes the idea that some people should be given special privileges because of their sex and/or minority status. Yet Jesus never claimed that there should be special privileges given to any particular race or sex. He never tried to pit men against women or whites against blacks. Instead, he called for unity among all the peoples of the earth. But DEI will never lead to unity. It will only lead to hatred, class/race/gender warfare, and an endless parade of grievances that ultimately tear our society apart.
Another mistake we have made is our obsession with rights. Now, I am certainly thankful for the rights that are laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the right to freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, the right to a trial by jury, and so on.
But rights are merely social constructs. They are not divine by nature. It is telling that the Bible does not define anything as a right. It says you should treat others as you would wish to be treated, but it does not say that you have a right to be treated well by others. It says that you should love your neighbor, but it does not say that you are entitled to have your neighbor love you. It does not say that you have a right to a job, an income, or someone else’s property.
The Founding Fathers got the idea of rights correct, but the problem is that we have expanded the notion of rights to cover things that the government simply cannot guarantee. We have been told that we have a right to “equity” (i.e. equal outcomes). We have a right to a well-paying job. We have a right to health care. We have a right to financial security. And thus there has been an expanding number of entitlement programs. The fact that they are called entitlements indicates that they are considered a right.
The authors of the Bible understood that pain, suffering, and hardship are inherent in the human condition, and so they never said that we have a right to be immune from any of these things. They never said we have a right to be happy and financially secure. They understood that to attempt to guarantee any of these things would be impossible.
The culture wars have been further inflamed by this obsession with rights, as it is now argued that women have the right to an abortion, gays have the right to marriage, young children have the right to gender transition without their parent’s consent, and trans women (i.e. biological men) have a right to compete on women’s sports teams and have access to women’s locker rooms. The idea of rights is simply out of control.
In a nutshell, the idea of rights has been corrupted in an attempt to provide justification for those who wish to rebel against God. It is meant to make it okay for us to reject the sacred roles that God has chosen for us. And God has certainly given us the freedom to reject them. We absolutely have the “right” to do so. But it is not okay to do so, as defying God’s laws always comes at a steep price. We think we have found true freedom, but what we inevitably get is enslavement.
One powerful example of this is pornography. This poison has been legalized under the banner of one of our most precious rights: freedom of speech. The notion that pornography is “speech” may be one of the most ludicrous ideas ever. Sadly, this is how the courts have ruled.
Numerous studies have clearly shown just how destructive pornography is both to individuals and relationships, yet we have declared that drinking this poison is a right. This illustrates better than almost anything just how warped our view of rights has become.
Last, but not least, we need to look at the way our society treats children:
And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for him that a huge millstone should be hung around his neck, and that he should be sunk in the depths of the sea. (Matthew 18:5-6)
Jesus here is teaching the importance of putting children first. This is something that we no longer do.
We have allowed no-fault divorce despite studies showing how harmful it is to children because we have deemed that the happiness of the parents is more important than that of the children.
We have allowed our public schools to become corrupted to the point where many fail to teach basic skills such as reading and writing, dooming many kids to poverty. These schools push homosexual and trans propaganda (two lifestyles the Bible also condemns), encouraging underage kids to engage in dangerous sexual behaviors, question their sexual identities, take dangerous life-altering drugs, and even undergo dangerous life-altering surgeries. During the COVID pandemic, the schools were shut down despite strong evidence that children were the least at risk. As a result, many kids have fallen even farther behind when it comes to learning.
We have allowed pornography to be legal and easily accessible online despite how clearly damaging it is to young children (Many young men who regularly view pornography become impotent; they likely began viewing it in their early years).
There are simply very few protections for children anymore.
A healthy society puts its children first. Yet we have failed to do so time and time again.
The conclusion is inescapable: We have become a selfish society. This is the heart of our problem.
We would do well to remember Mark 9:35, one of Jesus’s most important teachings:
If any man wants to be first, he must be last of all, and servant of all.
Too many of us are putting ourselves first. Too many of us are unwilling to serve others.
If we are to ever reverse the decline of the United States (as well as the rest of Western civilization), there is only one way it will happen.
We must once again start following the teachings of the Bible.
***
Some people who read this article will no doubt claim I am advocating to end women's suffrage (i.e. right to vote), but I want to be clear that I do not support such a drastic move. However, I would support raising the voting to age to 25 or 30.
The Electoral College and the Senate (two senators for each state regardless of the state’s population) are two important bulwarks against mob rule. The Electoral College forces a presidential candidate to create a national coalition in order to win (rather than just campaign in the most populous states and ignore the rest of the country) while the Senate gives less populous states more influence than they would otherwise have, and this means that passing a law usually requires getting votes from both sides of the political aisle (i.e. bipartisanship).
So while it would be incorrect to say that we have a Christian government, we certainly have a government that was inspired by Christianity and was designed for a Christian people. John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers, said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Unfortunately, many of the constraints designed to keep the federal government in check have gradually been removed.
Where did it all begin to go wrong?
An argument can be made that it began with a change in the voting laws. Originally, only property owners could vote. This not only prevented mob rule but also prevented radical ideas from getting any political traction, as people who own property are unlikely to support socialist ideas that favor seizing property or redistributing income.
The key to the long-term success and stability of any society is to keep its most radical elements in check. Not allowing everyone to vote is one of the surest ways to do this. Many people will recoil at the notion that allowing everyone to vote isn’t the absolute highest good, but it needs to be understood that democracy is not an end in itself. Democratic elections are simply a means to an end: The protection of individual liberty.
It was a gradual process, but eventually the voting laws were changed. By 1828, most states allowed all white men to vote regardless of whether they held property or not. By 1920, all women were given the right to vote as well. This was ratified in the Nineteenth Amendment.
Whatever positives universal suffrage has provided, it needs to be acknowledged that there have been serious negatives as well.
First, allowing everyone to vote has turned us into a more individualistic society. As of this writing, the United States is deeply divided with the Democratic party representing most female voters and the Republican party representing most male voters. Men and women are now pitted against each other politically, and this cannot be good for long-term social cohesion.
Second, universal suffrage has allowed envy to become a powerful political force. The Bible clearly warns against this destructive instinct. Envy first reared its ugly head with the passage of the Sixteen Amendment which allowed for the imposition of a federal income tax.
The income tax was initially promoted as a way to punish rich people who weren’t, as the tired cliché goes, “paying their fair share.” The income tax was sold on the notion that it would only apply to the top four percent of incomes. But, as the American people soon discovered, envy knows no bounds. The income tax was gradually expanded until it hit almost everyone. Before the income tax, Americans were among the lowest-taxed people in the entire world. Now, our standard of living has been dramatically reduced as at least twenty-five percent of our income is consumed by the federal government. Envy is truly one of the deadly sins.
But there was another downside to the income tax. The enormous amount of money it generated enabled the federal government to meddle in the lives of Americans to a degree that previously had never been possible. It was now able to engage in all kinds of corrupt social engineering that has made all of our lives worse. It was now able to create massive entitlements programs that, whatever their merits, have proven impossible to reform and now threaten to destroy the country’s financial solvency (and the country itself). That this happened should not be a surprise. History has shown that when you allow everyone to vote, the people will keep voting more and more benefits for themselves until it inevitably leads to a country’s bankruptcy and collapse.
The next disastrous move was the passing of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. This allowed for the direct election of senators. Previously, senators were chosen by the state governments. But now senators were no longer accountable to the state governments they represented, and this removed another restraint that was meant to keep the power of the federal government in check.
The Seventeenth Amendment was passed in the name of making our elections more democratic, but the Founding Fathers did not want this. They understood the danger of too much democracy. Given people’s corrupt nature, they knew this would inevitably push our politics in a more radical and dangerous direction.
The next blow came in 1917 when the Cloture rule passed. Previously, the U.S. Senate allowed unlimited debate on any bill. This meant that a single senator could block a vote from ever taking place. This prevented many bad laws from being passed. But the Cloture rule put an end to unlimited debate, and it was another crucial step that would allow the massive expansion of government that was to come in the 1930s with the New Deal.
I won’t go into detail about the New Deal. I will simply say that the creation of numerous government agencies in which “experts” would now manage the economy was another example of ignoring the corrupt nature of humanity that the Bible warns of. These agencies were designed to be unaccountable to the voters, and this unaccountability would allow greater government intrusion into every aspect of our lives. By every measure, the administrative state has strangled economic freedom and dramatically raised the cost of living.
Government intervention in the economy has led to one financial crisis after another, one of the most notable being the housing crisis of 2008. Did the government take responsibility for pressuring banks into making loans to minority groups regardless of whether those loans were likely to be repaid? Of course not. The political class blamed the banks for the financial crisis that it had created. Even worse, it used the crisis as an excuse to seize even more power for itself.
The belief in the infallibility of experts led to one of the most disastrous decisions in our country’s history: The shutting down of the entire economy in the wake of the 2020 COVID pandemic. Governors all over the country suddenly assumed dictatorial powers and shut our society completely down. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that our right to work and earn a living can be taken away in the event of a pandemic or any other emergency, yet this is exactly what happened. This ultimately led to trillions of dollars in new debt and massive inflation, yet there is little reason to believe that any lives were saved as a result.
In summary, it seems clear that the only way to keep the corrupt nature of humanity in check is to have a truly limited government where neither unaccountable “experts” nor the mob are able to have their way.
But the damage that has been done to our country is not just economic. We also need to discuss the collapse of marriage and the two-parent family. How did this happen? Again, it happened because we ignored what the Bible teaches.
It all started with the invention of the birth control pill. Its arrival was the equivalent of a nuclear bomb being dropped on the social order. Why? Because the pill now allowed people to easily engage in behavior that the Bible strictly forbids: Having sex out of wedlock.
Before the pill and legalized abortion, there was no way to control pregnancy. Because of this, women could not risk having multiple sexual partners since a pregnancy out of wedlock would ruin them (Men were not required to pay financial support for a baby born out of wedlock).
As a result, there was true “equity” in the sexual marketplace. This meant, to put it crudely, one per customer. Women could only have one sexual partner. And this gave everyone a fair chance at getting married.
But what about sexual freedom, you ask? Isn’t that a good thing?
Sexual freedom really only benefits the sexually powerful. It allows the alpha males to take most of the women for themselves. In other words, it allows the strong to trample the weak. The end result is a quasi-polygamous society in which most men get left out in the cold while most women get used and discarded.
Isn’t it telling that, in this new era of sexual freedom, there are actually far fewer people having sex than in the supposedly repressive era of the 1950s? More and more people are single and alone. Only the sexually powerful are able to thrive in this new Wild West that we have created. How ironic that the freedom to have sex with anyone you want is actually quite oppressive for the vast majority of people.
So while we now have more sexual freedom, few people actually benefit from it. And the tradeoff is that there is far less certainty. There is no longer a clear path to marriage as there once was, and there is no longer a guarantee that your spouse will stay with you. With so much uncertainty, is it really a surprise that so many people today are less happy than they were in the past? We have traded certainty for freedom, and more and more people are beginning to realize this was a very bad trade.
On top of all this, birth rates have fallen below replacement level not just in the United States but all over the world. God commands us all to marry and have children (Genesis 1:28), yet many people are simply refusing to do so. Either they don’t want to deal with the inconvenience of raising children or they aren’t willing to settle for a partner who is less than their imagined ideal. This refusal to obey the Bible threatens the existence of humanity itself.
Of course, we cannot complete discussion on the subject of sexual relations without talking about the complete gutting of the institution of marriage by allowing easy, “no-fault” divorce (It is worth noting that this disastrous change never would have happened if women had not been granted universal suffrage).
Jesus in the Bible forbids divorce. Yet we have adopted easy, no-fault divorce in the name of freedom. However, the freedom to break your marriage vow without proper cause is not a virtue. It is in fact a terrible betrayal (and it is long past time that it is recognized as such).
Our divorce laws are warped. They have created perverse incentives that encourage women to file for divorce (at least 80 percent are initiated by women) and encourage men not to get married at all since divorce usually results in men getting destroyed financially. Is it any surprise that marriage rates have collapsed and divorce rates have skyrocketed?
It took centuries to set up the institution of marriage which formed the bedrock of Western civilization and was instrumental to its ascendency and prosperity, yet it took only a few short years to destroy it. And all because we thought we knew better than Jesus. I will discuss how this can be reversed in the next article.
Our culture wars began due to the rise of radical left ideology in the 1960s. It promoted the victim-perpetrator model of the world which holds that everyone falls into one of two groups: victims or perpetrators. This overly simplistic view of reality is false, but it has been adopted by a substantial percentage of the population. A more recent derivative of this idea is critical race theory which holds that all white people are, if not overtly, then unconsciously racist.
Jesus warned against this:
Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the beam that is in your own eye? Or how will you tell your brother, ‘Let me remove the speck from your eye;’ and behold, the beam is in your own eye? You hypocrite! First remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:3-5)
The message here is clear. We should each fix our own flaws before seeking out flaws in others. For none of us are perfect human beings. The desire to blame entire groups of people for society’s problems has caused us to pit one group against another in what will be a never-ending battle unless and until this destructive ideology is finally cast aside.
Another destructive ideology is DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) which pushes the idea that some people should be given special privileges because of their sex and/or minority status. Yet Jesus never claimed that there should be special privileges given to any particular race or sex. He never tried to pit men against women or whites against blacks. Instead, he called for unity among all the peoples of the earth. But DEI will never lead to unity. It will only lead to hatred, class/race/gender warfare, and an endless parade of grievances that ultimately tear our society apart.
Another mistake we have made is our obsession with rights. Now, I am certainly thankful for the rights that are laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the right to freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, the right to a trial by jury, and so on.
But rights are merely social constructs. They are not divine by nature. It is telling that the Bible does not define anything as a right. It says you should treat others as you would wish to be treated, but it does not say that you have a right to be treated well by others. It says that you should love your neighbor, but it does not say that you are entitled to have your neighbor love you. It does not say that you have a right to a job, an income, or someone else’s property.
The Founding Fathers got the idea of rights correct, but the problem is that we have expanded the notion of rights to cover things that the government simply cannot guarantee. We have been told that we have a right to “equity” (i.e. equal outcomes). We have a right to a well-paying job. We have a right to health care. We have a right to financial security. And thus there has been an expanding number of entitlement programs. The fact that they are called entitlements indicates that they are considered a right.
The authors of the Bible understood that pain, suffering, and hardship are inherent in the human condition, and so they never said that we have a right to be immune from any of these things. They never said we have a right to be happy and financially secure. They understood that to attempt to guarantee any of these things would be impossible.
The culture wars have been further inflamed by this obsession with rights, as it is now argued that women have the right to an abortion, gays have the right to marriage, young children have the right to gender transition without their parent’s consent, and trans women (i.e. biological men) have a right to compete on women’s sports teams and have access to women’s locker rooms. The idea of rights is simply out of control.
In a nutshell, the idea of rights has been corrupted in an attempt to provide justification for those who wish to rebel against God. It is meant to make it okay for us to reject the sacred roles that God has chosen for us. And God has certainly given us the freedom to reject them. We absolutely have the “right” to do so. But it is not okay to do so, as defying God’s laws always comes at a steep price. We think we have found true freedom, but what we inevitably get is enslavement.
One powerful example of this is pornography. This poison has been legalized under the banner of one of our most precious rights: freedom of speech. The notion that pornography is “speech” may be one of the most ludicrous ideas ever. Sadly, this is how the courts have ruled.
Numerous studies have clearly shown just how destructive pornography is both to individuals and relationships, yet we have declared that drinking this poison is a right. This illustrates better than almost anything just how warped our view of rights has become.
Last, but not least, we need to look at the way our society treats children:
And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to stumble, it would be better for him that a huge millstone should be hung around his neck, and that he should be sunk in the depths of the sea. (Matthew 18:5-6)
Jesus here is teaching the importance of putting children first. This is something that we no longer do.
We have allowed no-fault divorce despite studies showing how harmful it is to children because we have deemed that the happiness of the parents is more important than that of the children.
We have allowed our public schools to become corrupted to the point where many fail to teach basic skills such as reading and writing, dooming many kids to poverty. These schools push homosexual and trans propaganda (two lifestyles the Bible also condemns), encouraging underage kids to engage in dangerous sexual behaviors, question their sexual identities, take dangerous life-altering drugs, and even undergo dangerous life-altering surgeries. During the COVID pandemic, the schools were shut down despite strong evidence that children were the least at risk. As a result, many kids have fallen even farther behind when it comes to learning.
We have allowed pornography to be legal and easily accessible online despite how clearly damaging it is to young children (Many young men who regularly view pornography become impotent; they likely began viewing it in their early years).
There are simply very few protections for children anymore.
A healthy society puts its children first. Yet we have failed to do so time and time again.
The conclusion is inescapable: We have become a selfish society. This is the heart of our problem.
We would do well to remember Mark 9:35, one of Jesus’s most important teachings:
If any man wants to be first, he must be last of all, and servant of all.
Too many of us are putting ourselves first. Too many of us are unwilling to serve others.
If we are to ever reverse the decline of the United States (as well as the rest of Western civilization), there is only one way it will happen.
We must once again start following the teachings of the Bible.
***
Some people who read this article will no doubt claim I am advocating to end women's suffrage (i.e. right to vote), but I want to be clear that I do not support such a drastic move. However, I would support raising the voting to age to 25 or 30.