For the first time in 15 years, Hanukkah and Christmas will coincide in 2024. The Jewish holiday begins with the first candle lighting at sundown on Christmas Day. These holidays are an important affirmation of our religious heritage. America was established on a biblical worldview, and it can’t survive without it.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Our form of government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” Ike was not saying that religious differences are unimportant but that faith itself is what matters.
George Washington – another soldier turned statesman – cautioned in his Farewell Address that “religion and morality are indispensable supports” of political prosperity.
His successor, John Adams, said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
President Ronald Reagan warned, “If we ever forget that we are one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.”
Today, we are a nation adrift in a sea of doubt.
According to a March Gallup survey, only 30% of Americans now attend religious services regularly, while 56% seldom or never do so. Those who don’t identify with any religion (the “nones”) rose from 13% in 2010 to 21% today.
Is it so surprising then that in an Emerson College poll, 41% of adults under 30 said the cold-blooded killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was “acceptable”?
This is what comes from not teaching religion to the young but instead allowing them to absorb the values of the secular culture.
All of our most intractable problems – including crime, drug abuse and depression – are related to a weakening of faith.
In its 12-step program, Alcoholics Anonymous explains: “Accepting a higher power helps you to see life from a different perspective and creates a sense of accountability.”
Religious people are happier, healthier and more involved with their family and community.
The left, which has an instinctive aversion to religion – Karl Marx called it the “opium of the masses”– keeps casting about for a substitute. The French Revolution created a Cult of Reason to replace Christianity and set up an altar to it in Notre Dame Cathedral.
In 2024, the Democratic Party tried to turn democracy (a word found nowhere in America’s founding documents) into a religion.
In his 2022 speech at Independence Hall, President Biden indicted his predecessor as a threat to democracy.
Mr. Biden used Independence Hall as a prop without any understanding of its real significance. The Declaration of Independence, which was signed there, speaks of unalienable rights endowed by the Creator. If such a document were produced today, progressives would be screaming that the authors had violated the mythical wall separating church and state.
Democrats saw the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol not as trespass and vandalism but as heresy – the pagans committing acts of sacrilege in the temple of democracy.
The failure of their attempts to deify democracy may be seen in the results of the 2024 election: President-elect Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to receive a majority of the popular vote.
As supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II, Eisenhower was as responsible as anyone for our victory. When our forces began liberating the death camps, the future president was so moved by the horrors uncovered that he was determined to document them.
On April 12, 1945, Eisenhower visited Dachau in the company of Gens. George Patton and Omar Bradley. He wrote to Winston Churchill that the English language didn’t have words to describe what he saw.
What he saw was a monument to depravity – to a government based on ideology, in this case, the master race theory – the only alternative to one based on religious values.
Modernity has witnessed so many horrific examples of state power driven by ideology – the Reign of Terror, communism, the Holocaust, Islamism (a cult masquerading as a religion) and the soft totalitarianism of diversity, equity and inclusion.
During the Revolutionary War, Valley Forge was the low point of the American cause. A famous painting by a contemporary artist shows Washington kneeling in the snow and praying outside the Continental Army’s encampment.
Such faith has sustained us in every war and national crisis. The fight to maintain our religious heritage is far more important than tariffs or tax cuts.
This column was first published at the Washington Times.
