'Some would protest that we've been here many times before in our history'
We are living at a critical moment in American history. How we respond today will go a long way in determining the future of our nation – or whether our nation even continues to exist as the United States of America.
Simply stated, without a sweeping revival in the church that leads to a national awakening, America as we know it is doomed. We will either continue to fall into moral and spiritual confusion, ultimately crashing and burning, or we will break up entirely as a nation, pulling apart at the seams. Either way, without revival, we are in very critical condition.
But here’s the catch. Revival alone will not get the job done. Revival alone will not turn the tide. It must be a revival in the church that leads to a reformation in the society, an outpouring that leads to awakening. Otherwise, to repeat, we are doomed. A powerful revival movement, without a national awakening, would just delay the inevitable or, worse still, simply make us more accountable. It really is revival and awakening, or we die. Or do we really think that the right political candidate or the latest social program will solve our problems and cure our ills? Not a chance.
How do we fix things when most American adolescents are “viewing online pornographic videos with motions and sounds, depicting every potential sexual act that can be imagined” and when, “The majority of kids are exposed to porn by age 13, with some exposed as young as 7, according to a 2020 survey”? How do we fix that?
How do we fix things when 40% of our children are born out of wedlock, with half of all births to first-time mothers occurring out of wedlock? As of 2019, America had the “world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households.” What is the political or social solution to problems like this?
How do we fix things when Americans with no religious affiliation rose from almost zero percent in the 1950s to almost one in three by 2021? In 2011, 75% of Americans identified as Christian. By 2021, that number had dropped to 63%, the most rapid drop in recorded polling history. How do we right the ship?
Speaking to a group of Catholic priests around the year 2010, Cardinal Francis George (1937-2015) said, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.” What profound words!
Some would protest that we’ve been here many times before in our history, with doomsayers repeatedly claiming that the end of the world was near. “It’s all over,” they shouted in years past. “America is doomed!” And yet here we are today, decades (or centuries) later, still economically strong, still powerful, still one nation. Perhaps I’m overstating things?
In point of fact, I’ve written extensively on this very subject, giving examples from our history of how, in fact, it appeared that it was all over for America (or at least for the church of America). Yet the tide turned, God poured out His Spirit, and America marched on. Obviously, the doomsday prophets were wrong. Perhaps my concerns will prove empty too?
But here is the three-fold, jarring reality: 1) It was powerful revival movements in the past that turned the tide and saved the nation. Nothing less will do today. 2) In many ways, we have been on a steady moral and spiritual decline since the counterculture revolution of the 1960s. So it really is revival or we die. 3) There is no guarantee that America will not go the way of the Roman Empire, fading into oblivion, or have a fate similar to the USSR, breaking into fragments. (The Soviet Union dissolved into 15 independent states.) Show me where it is written that this will not happen to our country. Show me the chapter and verse.
Speaking at the commencement exercises at Harvard University in 1978, the famed Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn brought a sobering word to the graduating class. Describing the horrors of the Communist Revolution, he said, “If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.'”
Writing eight years earlier, in 1970, Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer spoke plainly of America as a post-Christian nation. As summarized by Elliot Clark, “Yes, back in 1970, Schaeffer says the United States – not just continental Europe – was already post-Christian. He writes about the reality of historic Christianity becoming the minority in the West, stripped of cultural power and influence. And in this situation, Schaeffer identifies a great danger for evangelicals: taking sides with political elites in order to retain comfort, affluence, and personal peace. In the face of societal chaos and upheaval, Schaeffer doesn’t want Christians to compromise for the sake of short-lived comfort.
“… in response, Schaeffer calls for a kind of culture war – though not the sort of battles we might be imagining. Schaeffer wants a Christian revolution, the kind that looks like spiritual reformation.”
Yet even a Christian thinker as brilliant as Schaeffer might struggle to find the right words to describe the current state of our nation, one in which 13-year-old girls are encouraged by doctors to have their healthy breasts removed, simply because they are temporarily confused about their gender identity; one in which men’s bathrooms on college campuses have tampons, since “men can menstruate” too; one in which you can be banned from social media for “deadnaming” or “misgendering” someone (for example, calling Caitlyn Jenner “Bruce” or referring to him as “he”); one in which music videos saturated with the most profane, graphic and degrading sexual imagery are watched or downloaded hundreds of millions of times; one in which fentanyl overdoses have become the leading cause of death for adults between 18 and 45; one in which a Christian pastor who made reference to homosexual practice in a sermon 15 years earlier is disinvited from praying at a presidential inauguration while a gay bishop was invited to offer up special prayers by this same president four years earlier; one in which a major sports team publicly honors an anti-Catholic, Jesus-mocking drag group called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence; one in which we have now more millennial witches than Presbyterians. …
Need I say more?
That’s why our only hope is a sweeping, national revival that turns into a powerful, cultural awakening. It is the purpose of this book to lay out just how this can be done, all by the empowerment, grace and guidance of the Lord.
(Excerpted and adapted from Michael L. Brown, “Turn the Tide: How to Ignite a Cultural Awakening.”.)
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