How America Has Turned Away From Holy Spirit to Incremental Self-Indulgence by DAVID LANE for Charisma News
Having made the treacherous trek across stormy seas in ramshackle vessels, the American founders would have been appalled to learn how deep a nation founded “for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith” has fallen.
Secularism’s boisterous fanaticism and indiscriminate idolatry have desecrated the biblically based culture the founders established in Jamestown and Cape Cod.
Early American education placed Scripture as the principal component of public education. In the 17th and 18th centuries, 106 of the 108 established colleges were distinctly Christian. Religion and morality were considered so crucial to sustaining freedom that, simultaneously with the First Amendment, the Northwest Ordinance was passed on July 13, 1787, requiring all of the new states entering the Union to have education systems emphasizing the teaching of both religion and morality.
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Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance reads: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
Through the first centuries of the nation’s meteoric rise, public schools, courthouses and government buildings celebrated America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and biblically based culture by openly displaying the Ten Commandments everywhere across the nation.
Deplorably, the mission that the founders announced on arrival at Jamestown—”We commit to reach the people within these shores with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to raise up Godly generations after us”—has been scrubbed from the nation’s collective memory and hollowed out in every vestige of the culture. The nation has been reduced to the caricature of a deaf man who can read a treatise on acoustics and the fidelity of sound but has no idea what it is to hear sweet, harmonious music.
Take, for example, Missouri Democrat Congressman Emanuel Cleaver’s Invocation three weeks ago at the opening of the 117th Congress in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 3, 2021. The congressman concluded his prayer: “We ask it in the name of the monotheistic God, Brahma [Hindu god], and ‘god’ known by many names by many different faiths. Amen and a woman.”
Outlandish expressions like “amen [namely, a man] and a woman” illustrate perfectly how deep contemporary America has fallen down the rabbit hole of a disturbing state of mind resembling paganism. American culture is stone-deaf to the things of God. We should keep in mind that Cleaver holds a Master of Divinity from St. Paul School of Theology in Leawood, Kansas, and shepherded St. James United Methodist Church in Kansas City, Missouri, from 1972 to 2009.
