I am proud to be an American. Furthermore, I am a conservative American, and I am most importantly a Christian. I am a Christian who is old enough to wonder what happened to the America I used to know. Over the course of my lifetime America has changed; in some ways for the better, in many ways for the worse.
When I was born, America was a nation. Today, it is a fragmented society in which various segments divided by race, gender, and sexual preferences preach hate toward all the other segments. Currently white, working class, southern, heterosexual, Christian males are losing in the hate game, but like a rabid dog, once hate is unleashed it can turn on anyone. I am a part of the new underclass in a fragmented society in which everyone has special privileges except me. Unfortunately, many of us are too brainwashed to understand what is happening. Some even feel that it is our just punishment to be downtrodden. The American melting pot has been destroyed by politicians who divided the population into fragmented hate groups.
Many political offices require you to swear an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, both foreign and domestic. Most of the time, our military has successfully dealt with foreign enemies, but it is our politicians that are allowing our domestic enemies to destroy us from the inside.
Let’s consider four tools our domestic enemies are using:
First is Ignorance. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . . it expects what never was and never will be”(Thomas Jefferson) The domestic enemy has dumbed down our educational system, which used to be the envy of the world. According to a recent study by the U.S. Department of Education, 21% of adults read below 5th grade level. American students are lagging behind virtually all developed nations in reading and comprehension skills. However, it is important to understand that a students’ ignorance is not a failing of the government educational system – it is a crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of reformers and public policy experts have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. That was the goal all along!
Recent statistics show that not even a quarter of American students are proficient in US history. Only 20 percent of 6th graders, 17 percent of 8th graders, and 12 percent of high school seniors demonstrate a solid grasp on their nation’s history. In fact, American kids are weaker in history than in any of the other subjects tested.
When asked which of four countries; the Soviet Union, Japan, China, or Vietnam — was North Korea’s ally in fighting US troops during the Korean War, nearly 80 percent of 12th-graders selected the wrong answer. And these kids are not even aware they are being short-changed. Colleges report that students are actually shocked when they are placed into remedial math. Ignorance is a bad thing, but ignorance of your ignorance is even worse.
Second is Apathy. For a classic example of an interested and enthusiastic nation you can look back to America during the Second World War. While still reeling from the Great Depression, U.S. citizens in the 1940’s rallied around the war effort to support our soldiers overseas. Historians still marvel at what they accomplished. Most everyone was wholly invested: Posters reminded Americans of the reasons for the shortages and asked them to make do by conserving, by avoiding the black market, and by generally becoming more self-reliant. Nowhere is the totality of the war effort seen more clearly than when Americans plowed up their lawns to grow “Victory Gardens”to reduce the need of vegetables at home so the soldiers could be supplied overseas.
President Roosevelt challenged the country to get to work. He stated: “Powerful enemies must be out-fought and out-produced…We must out-produce them overwhelmingly, so that there can be no question of our ability to provide a crushing superiority of equipment in any theatre of the world war.”
The people responded. Elderly quit retirement to help build ships. Women, by the millions, left their positions as homemakers to work in factories. American civilians built 14,000 ships, 88,000 tanks, and 300,000 airplanes in the four years of war. In 1944 alone, the U.S. constructed more planes than Japan did throughout the entire war.
Despite only having 5 percent of the world’s population, in 1945, the U.S. produced 50 percent of the world’s manufactured goods.
We were also financially committed. More than 85 million Americans of the 139 million at the time (64%) bought government war bonds. Half of the total cost of war, $340 billion in 1940 dollars, was paid for by income from bonds, even children participated. In today’s dollars, this would be like every man, woman and child in America investing nearly $8,900 in the war effort. Some borrowed money to buy war bonds to support our country. Do you see why they are called the “greatest generation?” Imagine modern Americans backing any cause like this.
So why the drastic change since then? It is apathy. During most elections half of us don’t even vote, and many that do, cast an ignorant vote.
Third is Socialism. Socialism at one time was a foreign enemy, but no longer. It is a domestic enemy today. Socialism is the opposite of social responsibility. Capitalism has been the most dynamic force for economic progress in history. Over the past century, it has delivered billions of people out of poverty, raised living standards to once-unimaginable heights, and enabled an unprecedented growth of creativity. But among young Americans, it is apparently not very popular.
A Survey of Americans ages 18 to 34 finds that 62 percent think “we need a strong government to handle today’s complex economic problems;” with just 35 percent saying “the free market can handle these problems without government being involved.” Actually, socialism gets higher marks than capitalism from Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans. Sixty-one percent of Democrats take a positive view of socialism as do 25 percent of Republicans.
Another survey by George Barna indicated that four out of every ten adults say they prefer socialism to capitalism. That is the stuff of civil wars. It ought to set off alarm bells among more traditionally-oriented leaders across the nation. As socialist countries have fallen across the world, little did we know that the fires of socialism were being stoked all across America where it is held in higher regard than in nations that have suffered under it. Americans who believe in limited government, welfare reform, and states’ rights should look over their shoulder and realize that a dangerous ideology is gaining ground. A crowd that you thought history had left behind is growing.
The Final Domestic Enemy is Ungodliness. True Socialism or Communism has no place for anything else but itself as a belief system or the state as an object of worship. To examine the largest concentrations of atheists in the world is to look at a map of current and former communist and socialist countries. Christianity or Judaism, as a rule, usually does not thrive in a communist or socialist nation. So, for socialism to thrive in America, Christianity must go first.
The framers of our constitution, being people of faith, learning, and reason, designed God into the founding documents that would define the United States. Why? The framers knew that to succeed, the nation needed to be beholden to something greater than the will and character of flawed humans, no matter how noble those humans were. Those finer and greater things were the rule of law and the blessing of God.
The ultimate irony in United States history is that a nation so founded upon God may find God to be its undoing. Under socialism, there is no place for God. When God leaves, His blessings depart as His judgment arrives. John Adams said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
“I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion—for who can search the human heart?—but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society. (Alexis de Tocqueville)
When an unnamed refugee from Castro’s Cuban regime began to realize that the socialism he had risked his life to get away from was now being embraced in America, He said to a fellow American: “You’re not as fortunate as I was; I had somewhere else to go. You can’t escape; you must stand and fight if you want to be free, for you have nowhere else to go.”
He was right. If freedom dies here where are you going to go? Oh, I know some nations still have far more liberties than others, but freedom is dying all across the globe. We need to combat the epidemic of ignorance that pervades our nation, we must battle against personal apathy, we must fight against the evils of socialism, and most importantly we must renew our dependence upon God. These four things are not an exhaustive list, but they do give us a starting point in rebuilding our nation.
The America I knew as a child is gone, and even with all of her imperfections, I miss her a lot. As a father I have been unable to fully explain to my own children how special it was to live in the America of my childhood. I cannot bring back the past, but maybe, just maybe I can use the liberties I still enjoy to slow my country’s demise into a socialist state.
Dr. Worthington has been in the ministry over forty years and serves as President of Pathway Ministries.