Today’s Americans are mostly unaware of the deep spiritual beliefs held by the founders of our country. Of the original 13 colonies, for example, eight, were founded by religious groups; Puritans in the New England colonies, and in the middle and southern colonies, Quakers and Anglicans, and in Maryland, Catholics and non-conformist Protestants. By 1702 all of the thirteen colonies had some form of state religion, varying from tax support for the churches to religious requirements for voting or holding office in the state legislature.
In 1791, however, the Bill of Rights was ratified, guaranteeing certain freedoms to all Americans and removing the state-sanctioned religions which reeked too much of Great Britain from whom they had won their independence. The first amendment is clear about religion in the United States when it reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”
And thus, a country of thirteen colonies, now banded together in a federation of states, largely created to promote the worship of God as each individual saw fit with the blessing of the government but without a government-forced religion that all must follow, came into being. For nearly the first two hundred years of its existence, religion remained an important part of American life. Family life centered around the church. Services in most protestant churches were held on Sunday mornings and evenings, and people attended both. Wednesday nights, adults went to Bible study and children to special children activities. Those who could sing (and some who couldn’t) joined the church choir and devoted another night to choir practice. Summers were filled with Vacation Bible School which ran for two weeks and involved the young children in classes and the older children as helpers to the mothers who ran it. Then there were summer church camps for those who could afford the camp fees.
And then life changed. To football, baseball, basketball and band we added cross country, track, soccer, volleyball, cheerleading, softball, swimming and weight lifting. Every child was encouraged to participate in as many things as possible and parents busied themselves ferrying them to and from school in the evenings and on the weekends. Summers were filled with band camps, football conditioning, and city league teams in every sport imaginable that often competed with teams in other states. Who had time for church?
Bible reading was replaced with radio, then movies, then television, then computers and computer games, and those who no longer thought about God, heard about God, talked about God began to relegate God to the fairy tales of childhood and fill the God-space in their souls with Climate Change and Critical Race Theory instead. Without God, they lost their moral compass. Without God, there is no absolute Right or Wrong, no Good or Evil. Right and Good are what you say they are, and Wrong and Evil are whatever you disagree with. And this is where we are today.
A recent Gallup poll found that among all Americans only 80% still believe there is a God, roughly 70% of Democrats and 90% of Republicans. Yet we still pay lip service to God. Chaplains serve in every branch of the Armed Forces. Both the House of Representatives and the Senate open each day’s session with a prayer by the Senate or House Chaplain or by a guest they have invited, a tradition begun in 1789.
When an atheist, Daniel Barker, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, was invited to “pray” by a member of the House in 2019, the Chaplain refused to allow him to give the “prayer,” and he sued. But the D.C. Court of Appeals found against Barker because the prayer must be a religious prayer to a “higher power” and thus a secular “prayer” by an atheist is not acceptable.
Every year, the United States Congress sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast which is organized on their behalf by a Christian organization, The Fellowship Foundation, and held in the Washington D.C. Hilton ballroom. Attended by over 3,000 guests, it draws members of Congress, social, and business leaders and usually has two speakers at the main breakfast, the President of the United States and a guest speaker.
Our money still bears the words “In God We Trust,” and the pledge of allegiance ends with the words, “One nation under God with liberty and justice for all.” But do we really trust in God? Some of us do, certainly. But that Gallup poll indicates that two out of every 10 Americans don’t even believe there is a God, and how many that believe He exists view Him as a benevolent and distant figure who plays no discernable part in our daily lives.
Yet Hebrews 9:27 reminds us “. . .it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment. . ..” Judgment? For what are we to be judged? We will be judged by whether we have accepted Jesus as our Savior and if we have then attempted to live our lives according to His teachings. This is an obvious problem for those who do not believe there is a God. But for those who do believe, it may also be a problem.
What of the denominations that ignore the Biblical passages that clearly define sexual sins such as the following in Romans 1:26-28: “ Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error. Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done.”
And in 1 Timothy 1:8-11, Paul sums up a long list of sins that sadly can be found in many churches today: “We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.”
And there are many other verses. As for the sudden appearance in America of multiple sexes or “genders,” Genesis 1:26 and 27 clearly states that God created only two sexes. “ And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
Jesus repeats this to the Pharisees as recorded by Mark in Mark 10:6-8: “’But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh.’”
Appologists for transgenderism and multiple genders argue that although God first created male and female, He later created other genders that the Bible simply does not record. What? Hum. But the Bible does say that He created all the birds and all the animals and all the things that creep on the earth, male and female (no multiple genders in your cows and goats are there!). And it records the creation of the heavens, the moon, the sun, the stars, and the earth. But no mention of those pesky binary people! How remiss of Him!
The explanation for the prohibition against homosexuality is that people did not understand sexuality in Biblical times. I rather think they understood it all too well! There was just as much sexual perversion then as now and God needed to provide laws for His people to warn them against such acts. A clear look at nature and science show that homosexuality, multiple genders, and transgenderism are unnatural. Human bodies are configured for male to female sex, not for male to male or female to female.
Nor do we find homosexual bulls that have sex only with other bulls or stallions who refuse to have sex except with other stallions. And any biologist who is not a confirmed Democrat afraid of losing his/her reputation or job will tell you that DNA determines sex/gender and that it cannot be changed by no matter how many hormone treatments or operations. If Caitlyn Jenner’s skeletal remains were to be found, unidentified, years from now, and examined by a forensic anthropologist, that scientist would determine them to be the remains of an adult male based upon height, length of bones, width of pelvic, skull, and many other small measurements. Thus, after all the hormones and operations, what you end up with is the same biological male or female you started with, who is now mutilated beyond recovery. That this is pushed by the far left and the Democrat Party who feels they need these leftists to win re-election is sad and frightening. That it is being also preached by many Christian churches and Jewish Synagogues under the guise of “love” is an abomination.
Among Christians, church attendance through the years has remained fairly static, but fewer and fewer Americans claim Christ as their Savior and Guide. Thus many who sit in a pew now and then are there as a social or political statement rather than a wish to worship a God whom they love. Further, there is another alarming problem.
Ryan Burge, assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, using data from the General Social Survey, discovered that the traditional life pattern of a return to church when a generation reaches their mid-30s does not seem to hold true for those born after 1970. They simply aren’t coming back, no longer see a need for God in their lives, aren’t raising their children in church.
Indeed, let’s return to the number of Americans who believe in God. Only 8 out of every 10 Americans. A friend of mine, after a conversation with me, asked her grandchildren whether or not they believed there was a God. My friend and her husband are traditional Catholics who attended a Catholic high school, sent their children to a Catholic school, took their children to church regularly, and whose children, to my knowledge, still attend church (though not all are still Catholics) fairly regularly. Her grandchildren all answered that “no,” they did not believe there was a God. She was flabbergasted.
But why should we be astonished? We no longer make our children go to church, to church camp, to Vacation Bible School because they are too busy with soccer and volleyball and baseball. And because we want them to excel at those sports so we can bask in the reflection of their glory as they bring home trophies or score scholarships to universities. And so very many church services are boring. Admit it. They are. You stand, you sit, you sing a dull hymn which has little meaning to the kids, you take communion, someone collects the offering, someone gives a sermon that is of little interest to them, someone prays, you go home. It is the same every week. The songs are slow and, except in evangelical churches, are sung to stately melodies that are like classical music to the ears of a rock star.
And beyond this loss of the young, mainline protestant churches have lost members to evangelical churches because of their compromising of longtime Christian beliefs. In their effort to retain membership, much like the Democrat Party, they have laid aside the teachings of the Bible and embraced every issue that the extreme left has pushed from gay marriage, transgenders, a woman’s right to choose to abort her baby, and climate change to Critical Race Theory. In the midst of all of this social preaching, there remains little time for preaching the Gospel of Christ, and these churches become more a social club of liberals than a worshipping gathering of Christians.
As the verses above show, the Bible and Jesus himself clearly state that God created man and woman, two genders or sexes. There are no more, nor can a human take the man that God has created, with all the intricacies of his brain, heart, lungs, muscles, skeleton, and reproductive organs and turn them into those of a woman. Nor can the reverse be done. This is not only a myth, but a dangerous one, for it tampers with God’s creation in a way that cannot be reversed. Homosexuality is also forbidden by the Bible, yet many mainline “Christian” churches welcome homosexuals as pastors. How can someone who is living a life of sin preach to a congregation about how to be closer to God?
In his letter to the Romans, Paul could easily have been talking about Americans today when he said, “ They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.
In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done.
They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.
Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.” (Romans 1:25-32).
This is the apostate America in which we live today.
But what can we do? We need a revival, another “Great Awakening.” And as the song “Revive Us Again” says, “Send a revival, let it start in me!” Each of us needs to pray more, to read our Bibles more, to think more about God. We need to be in church whenever the doors are open, and if we are on vacation, we need to find a church to attend wherever we are. We don’t want God to take a vacation from caring for us, so why should we take a vacation from Him? And if we have children, it is time to act like parents. It is time to curtail their online activities and push them to read the Bible as well. Cut out some of those multiple sports activities and send them to Vacation Bible School and Church Camp in the summer. And if they are living in your house, they abide by your rules. Take them to church whether they like it or not! the Bible says to “train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it,” (Proverbs 22:6). Only we can save America. It will take hard work and determination and faith! Are we willing to do it?