America's Coming Doom

Harmless college fun?

One of the frequent themes of my messages has been the decline and decay of traditional moral values in western civilization.

Since the end of World War II, the western world has been sliding into a moral and spiritual abyss. Consider that in just the past 40 years, we've seen the legalization of infanticide (abortion), gay marriage and marijuana.  

We've also seen the collapse of traditional marriage, the disintegration of the nuclear family, skyrocketing divorce rates, millions of babies born out of wedlock, the explosion of crime and rampant drug and alcohol abuse.

What's the reason for all this? It's very simple: Christianity has lost its influence over the culture. Actually, that influence started to wane in the 19th century when Christian seminaries--particularly in Europe--began rejecting the Bible as the inspired word of God and began importing the godless ideas of secular humanists.

That resulted in the church's embrace of secular humanistic psychology to address emotional and behavioral problems that were rooted in sin. Since the Bible was no longer considered sufficient to meet the emotional needs of people, the church turned to atheists such as Freud, Maslow, Rogers, Jung etc. to find new solutions for ageless problems related to mankind's rebellion against God.

America's seminaries followed their European counterparts and began to "expand" their realm of ideas from the Bible to other spiritual and material sources. No longer was Jesus Christ considered "the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6).  Rather, he was downgraded to just another religious figure in a pantheon of holy men.

Even worse, the church not only failed to "contend for the faith" (Jude 1:3) by refuting the unprovable theories of Charles Darwin, much of Christendom actually embraced evolution as credible science, despite the lack of evidence. If evolution is true, then the Bible's Book of Genesis is false. And if Genesis is false, then rest of the Bible disintegrates like a straw hut in a hurricane. 

What evolution does is deny God's existence. It attempts to explain the existence of life as a natural accident without any design, purpose or meaning. Not only is evolution far from scientific, it was even dismissed as nonsense by Albert Einstein who was an agnostic.

Nevertheless, in the absence of the Judeo-Christian influence, western civilization continues its slide into the moral abyss. And the void left by the Christian church has been filled by humanists who've indoctrinated millions of people into secularism and its corollaries such as nihilism and existentialism. 

Humanists deny God and teach that to impressionable young children. And humanists malign those who believe in God as simple-minded morons who are anti-science. 

And so, if people no longer believe in God, then they don't believe that they held morally accountable for their behavior here on earth. They will then become moral reprobates--the type of people described by the apostle Paul in his epistles. (Romans 1:18-32, 2 Timothy 3:1-5)

Thus, religion becomes ever more cultural and ever less relevant to the lives of millions. You'd be surprised at how many professing Christians no longer believe in God. That's what happens when a living faith morphs into a dead religion. For many folks, Christianity has become just a dead, mundane tradition. That's what cultural Christianity is.

In two weeks, millions of Americans will go to the polls to vote for political candidates they hope will help turn the tide of America's relentless moral decay. 

But you don't change a culture at the ballot box. Because political leaders reflect the culture they come from. If you don't believe that, then think Barack Obama. He's a product of a morally decadent society. And he shows it.

If Americans want to reverse the moral slide their country's been on for the past 70 years, then they need to make Christianity relevant once again to the nation. 

That means getting out into the streets and preaching the Gospel. That means making the faith relevant to society once again. And that means being willing to put up with the inevitable abuse and persecution that preaching the Gospel brings. Remember, there's no other way.