Ever been lost when you were a youngster? It’s a scary feeling. You don’t know where you are and you don’t know the way home. So how would you find your way home? In the era before cellular phones, you would have had to find a pay phone (provided you had sufficient coins) and call your parents to come help you. This is a fitting analogy to the state of our nation at the current time. As a nation, we are lost and foundering. We are divided into polar opposite camps. The only way to get back home is to look to those who founded our nation and go back to the principles of our founding fathers.
On November 3, 1980, President Ronald Reagan declared, I have quoted John Winthrop's words more than once on the campaign trail this year—for I believe that Americans in 1980 are every bit as committed to that vision of a shining city on a hill, as were those long ago settlers ... These visitors to that city on the Potomac do not come as white or black, red or yellow; they are not Jews or Christians; conservatives or liberals; or Democrats or Republicans. They are Americans awed by what has gone before, proud of what for them is still… a shining city on a hill.
In President Reagan’s words, America is a “shining city on a hill,” a beacon of freedom to all the world. Our beacon has grown progressively dimmer since the president’s inaugural speech in 1980. In 2022 America is in chaos. Let me list just a few of the issues which divide us:
- Illegal immigration. Immigrants continue to flood our southern border; many are criminals, nearly all are illegals. Finish the wall and permit orderly entry into America by those who have been vetted and are legal. The opposite is to secretly fly illegal immigrants to cities all around the nation and sow them in our communities.
- Racial indoctrination. Restrict the teaching in our schools to academic curricula. The opposite is to teach social equity including Critical Race Theory which pits races against one another.
- Sexual progressivism. Refuse to accept that we can choose which gender we want to be or which pronoun we will accept and refuse to endorse or embrace homosexuality in whatever form it takes as normal. If God calls it sinful, so must we. Take no pride in PRIDE month. The opposite is the forced agenda of homosexual activists or those touting transgenderism. Americans are being inundated by Hollywood, the media and some corporations such as Disney.
- Energy independence. In recent memory we were an energy independent nation who supplied oil and natural gas to the world. We need to get back to that level of energy independence by drilling for oil, opening pipelines again. The opposite is the Green New Deal which phases out fossil fuels and depends solely on environmentally-friendly sources of energy such as wind, solar, and hydroelectric.
We need to go back to the basics, back to the principles and values that made us a shining city on a hill. Those values are embedded in our constitution. We need to teach it to every American because there are forces at work in our nation to twist our constitution as though it were a wax nose, shaped in whatever image the sculptor desires. We cannot let that happen.
So what is the cause of this chaos in our great country? I would submit that we have turned our backs on God. Our money declares, “In God We Trust” but as a nation we don’t truly believe that. We have excluded God from our schools, our government, our entertainment, our personal lives, and, sadly, our churches. Like the people of Gadara in Mark 5:17, we have kicked God out of our country. He restricts our freedom and we can’t permit that! More than any time in our 246 year history, America needs a Great Awakening, a spiritual revival! God and only God is the answer to American plethora of problems.
Sorry to be such a “Debbie Downer” this month, but I am grieved over what I see going on in my beloved country.
Irv