Our founding fathers did agree
To write a list of principles
For keepin' people free
The U.S.A. was just startin' out
A whole brand-new country
And so our people spelled it out
The things that we should be
And they put those principles down on paper and called it the Constitution, and it's been helping us run our country ever since then.”
The Preamble, Schoolhouse Rock, 1975
If you were a kid who grew up on Saturday morning cartoons in the 70’s and 80’s you may have sung the above. If you were born in the new millennium there is a good possibility that, not only have you not heard it, but you don’t even know what it is talking about. Fewer and fewer people today can tell you when our Constitution was ratified. Fewer still can tell you the principles on which the United States was founded or why the articles and amendments of the Constitution are important. When we forget our history, we make it possible for someone to hijack our present and that is where tyranny begins. Our founding fathers would be so disappointed in what we have become that I would give odds that many of them would move back to Britain.
Most people I know just don’t care about any of this stuff. They don’t see how it impacts their day-to-day lives. It has been such a long time that we have had to live with any real oppression that it is a concept we can no longer understand. We feel entitled to our freedom. We keep our liberty only as long as we are willing to fight for it. The truth of the matter is that our liberties have been slowly eroding since the beginning of the progressive movement that began in the early 1900’s. We are frogs slowly being boiled to death and we don’t have a clue. Come on in. The water is nice.
It is no surprise that we are also seeing the eroding of faith-based organizations. Christianity in particular is seeing the number of practicing people decline sharply in the last twenty years. The number of people who claim no religious affiliation has been increasing incrementally year after year. This has church leaders wringing their hands, trying to find ways to bring people back to the faith. I know the Catholic Church has become as accommodating as possible to try to keep people in the pews to no avail. The pandemic has only hastened people's departure.
Why?
People turn to God during hard and challenging times. When times are good God is seldom thought of. Take for example the recent tragedy of Damar Hamlin. Damar was a twenty-four-year-old football player who suffered a cardiac arrest while playing in a Monday night game. While the EMT’s worked to save Damar’s life his entire team knelt around him in prayer. Everyone in that stadium that night and the entire country soon after also joined together in praying for Damar. This is a good thing but it wasn’t that long ago when another football player, Tim Tebow, was roundly mocked when he would take a knee to pray and thank God for his talent. We also saw Joe Kennedy, a high school football coach, lose his job for privately praying on the field after a game.
We talk about the New Evangelization and try to find new and engaging ways to bring the Gospel of the Lord to those who have not heard it. The problem is that there are few, at least in the United States, who have never heard about Jesus. You would almost have to be living off-grid somewhere in the wilds of Alaska to not have heard at least something about Jesus. Many will listen to the stories from the bible in the same way they watch a movie like Star Wars. They are great stories but they have little relevance or impact on their day-to-day lives.
Like with our Constitution, the greatness the Judeo-Christian faith brought to our world is considered common place and we reap the benefits with a sense of entitlement. As I stated in the beginning, when we forget our history, we make it possible for someone to hijack our present and that is where tyranny begins. We are seeing this happen in our society now. As we cast off the tenants of the Judeo-Christian faith, we see a world embracing untruth, chaos, and death. If left unchecked, this will lead to the destruction of our society and we will have to rebuild from the ash of what used to be.
When we look at the history of man, we find that this is precisely the cycle of how things happen. God calls man from chaos. Man becomes prosperous. Man turns from God to do it on his own accord. Man returns to chaos. Man turns to God for salvation. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Those who fail to learn from history and bound to repeat it. Those who do learn from history suffer from it when it is repeated.
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