How Did It Get to This Point?

Kenny Chumbley
10/14/12 - Attitude

In Charles Colson's unsettling book Against the Night, he writes: "We sense that things are winding down, that somehow freedom, justice, and order are slipping away. Our great civilization may not yet lie in smoldering ruins, but the enemy is within the gates. The times seem to smell of sunset. Encroaching darkness casts long shadows across every institution in our land."

I try to convince myself that Colson is wrong, that we're not as bad off as he claims, but the evidence is too blatant to ignore. Of one thing I'm sure: the America I now live in is not the America I grew up in. Things once thought nailed down are coming loose. Our work ethic, innovative spirit, liberty, and decency are slipping away. And as Dr. Thomas Sowell observed, "Perhaps worst of all, much of the degeneracy of our times is not merely tolerated, but celebrated."

How did we get here? How have we moved so far—morally, spiritually, and politically—from where we once were as a nation? It didn't happen overnight, and for an answer, I would point to the explanation given by the theologian and jurist John Warwick Montgomery who, in his book The Shaping of America, traces the problem back three centuries.

In the 18th century, the Bible was killed. "Deism," a popular philosophy of the time, didn't deny the existence of God but denied the Bible was the word of God. The deists claimed that man, simply by observing the world around him and by using his innate reason, could determine right and wrong and good and evil completely apart from the Bible. Many of the founding fathers, such as Thomas Paine, Jefferson, Franklin, et al., were deists.

In the 19th century, God was killed. When philosophers looked at the world in the nineteenth century, they didn't see "nature's God" (of whom Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence), but "the survival of the fi ttest." They saw a situation in which might made right. It was in this century that Nietzsche coined the phrase, "God is dead." Having killed off the book that reveals God, man then killed off God Himself. And without God, man was free to formulate his own ethical and moral standards.

In the 20th century, man was killed. Listen, whenever morality and ethics are subjectively determined by man rather than God, it always happens that morality is determined by the strongest man around. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, et al. exemplifi ed this. They believed they had the right to determine and impose their own moral standards and decide who should live and who should die. Consequently, there was greater destruction of man by his fellows in the twentieth century than in all of recorded history to that point.

And it doesn't seem to be getting any better. If the darkness is casting long shadows across our country, maybe it's because we've turned our back on the One who calls us to love and mercy and service.