Since his inauguration on January 20, President Trump has delivered more positive achievements for more of the American people than any other president serving an equivalent time in office. Yet, Trump has experienced more opposition, including assassination attempts, than any other president since the Civil War. In fact, 67 percent of all federal injunctions in the last 100 years have been issued against President Trump.
When opposition and hostility to a national leader who is delivering major solutions for the people is so obviously irrational, it is imperative to understand what is at work to cause such division and hatred. With the 250th anniversary of America’s founding only a year away, we can start with identifying the one or two cultural variables that are dramatically different between the first 125 years and the last 125 years of American history that may explain this division, hatred, and decline.
The two variables that have dramatically changed from America’s first half to its second half are: 1) the marginalization of God and Christianity; and 2) the rise of demonic influence and apocalyptic cults.
Because Christianity’s key tenets are forgiveness and love, we should never underestimate the consequences of secularization over the last century and accelerating into the present. With diminished Christian influence in culture, social and family relations, manners, civility, and honesty are markedly worse today than a century or two ago. With the declining influence of the Christian world view, paganism and the worship of nature have been on the rise, with many embracing apocalyptic cult group think—often linked to a negative impending doom.
The 2012 Democratic National Convention removed any and all references to "God" from the party's platform, which was a 24,000-word plus mission statement. At the same time the Democrat Party has embraced false and apocalyptic views, like gender is fluid and man-made CO2 levels are dangerously high and the root cause of climate change.
Now, with Donald Trump’s second term, the Democrats have gone into overdrive abandoning rational analyses and simply believing that whatever Trump does is a coming apocalypse that must be resisted and fought by any means whatsoever.
In America’s first half, the rise of wholesale evil was mitigated because Christianity permeated the country’s culture—providing spiritual protection. The country’s founding came out of thirteen separate colonies, which had one important thing in common: a belief that Christianity was the basis for the cultural, social, and political order of each. In spite of denominational, ethnic, geographic, and linguistic differences between the thirteen colonies, each expressed a reverence for God in their respective state charters and constitutions, recognizing that Christianity was central to the moral order and social peace.
With the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the thirteen colonies became independent states operating under a weak federal government based on the Articles of Confederation. It took another six years after the final defeat of the British at Yorktown in 1781, before the Constitutional Convention convened for the purpose of forming a new more effective government. There were 55 delegates to that convention, 95 percent of whom self-identified as Christian. The Constitution was shaped by Christianity, with the Bible being the most cited source in the debates in and around the Constitutional Convention.
The framers dismissed any notion of establishing Christian theocratic state because it was contrary to God’s natural order of diversity. So they set about creating a system that protected individual rights and freedom -- including religious freedom – while also restraining government abuse of power and corruption through: 1) checks and balances between three branches of federal government; 2) a federal system that pitted state power against federal government power; and 3) the codification of frequent elections—to enable regular cleansing by voting out charlatans, corruption and abuse of power.
America was the first nation in human history that was based on two simple axioms that government should protect the people’s unalienable God-given rights to be free, and protect the people from abuse of power and corruption that plagued all prior governments from the beginning of time. And while the U.S. government didn’t perfectly live up to its constitution on these two requirements, the American people thrived and the Unted States flourished, becoming “a city on a hill” and the greatest economic and military power in the world in just 125 years.
America’s fate in the last century has taken a turn for the worse that is correlated to the marginalization of God and Christianity. In this regard, the first two presidents, George Washington and John Adams, were prescient about our present problems with incivility and ungovernability. Both agreed that a moral and religious people were necessary for the success of America's Constitutional Republic. Washington, in his Farewell Address, emphasized the importance of religion and morality as "indispensable supports" for political prosperity. Adams similarly stated that "our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
The modern day prophet Jonathan Cahn, author of The Harbinger, which sold over two million copies and was a New York Times bestseller for two years, explains that as America drove God out of its culture in the last half of the 20th century right into the present, the protective hand of God and the Holy Spirit was diminished and removed, creating a sort of vacuum that allowed demonic spirits to occupy and influence America.
Taking account of the past and present and arriving at a solution for the future, we can be sure that spiritual revival will be pivotal for our country’s turn-around. How that takes place may be unclear, but we can be sure that God has a plan if only we will listen and act.
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Scott S. Powell is senior fellow at Discovery Institute and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. His timeless book, Rediscovering America, has been the number one Amazon New Release in the history genre for eight weeks. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1637581599. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org