Our nation once placed a high priority upon the American family. Parents, teachers and politicians alike viewed the family and its moral and cultural virtues as the most basic building block of society. Parents and government recognized the need for the next generation to observe the basic tenants of their Christian values.
Church was a more significant part of family and society, along with the government, which did what it could to support the parents’ values.
The U.S. government has been well-served by generations of young people raised with Christian values. Historically, millions of people have made it their life’s ambition to come to this God-blessed land. America has welcomed people from all nations to come here, work hard and experience opportunity and freedom unavailable anywhere on Earth, until now!
The very concept of freedom as we know it came through the teaching of the Bible. The same book public schools today will not allow our children to read or discuss. What made America so different? Established by a small group of families determined to live by biblical principles, and not allowing despots to determine their future freedom. Principles based on adherence to the Ten Commandments and ”Loving your neighbor as yourself” Recognizing mankind’s basic flaw the prophet Jeremiah warned about almost 2,000 years before, “The heart of man.is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it”
The Pilgrims recognized the many attempts to limit their forefathers’ freedom in England before they came here. King Charles I said the law of the land was whatever he said it was. Oliver Cromwell disagreed with him, and Charles lost.
The current war directed at Christians today is a systematic attack on the values chosen almost 400 years ago and later protected by a Constitution based on those same Pilgrim Christians’ biblical values. Some years ago, Ted Koppel, addressing students at Duke University, spoke of the ”Vannatizing” of society -how television (among other media) has become less and less an outlet for the expression of complex, intellectual subjects and more a purveyor of ambiguity and empty slogans in the service of selling products and other ideas qf ethical and moral standards. He gave two examples of this:
1 “Shoot up if you must, but be sure to use a clean needle.”
2. “Enjoy sex with whomever and whenever you may but make sure you use protection.”
The answer is no, not because it isn’t cool or you may end up in jail or dying in an AIDS ward, but because it is wrong!
Koppel continued: ‘We have spent 5,000 years as a race of relatively rational human beings trying to overcome the curse of man’s proclivity to do the wrong things that naturally lead to destructive behavior while searching for the ‘truth’ and the moral absolutes it contains. In place of the truth, we have discovered facts and for moral absolutes we have substituted moral ambiguity.”
He described the modem Tower of Babel as the television tower. ”Voices everywhere and every voice and every opinion is given the same value by a society that has lost its moral foundation.
Culminating with the principle that society finds truth as a medicine too strong to take in undiluted form. What Moses brought down from the mountain were not Ten Suggestions but Ten Commandments.”
These were the foundation of America’s values, laws and ultimate success for hundreds of years, until now! We old-timers are now leaving what has been a God-blessed nation to our children, a nation that doesn’t work, is deeply in debt, morally, financially, politically, culturally bankrupt with leadership that our enemies don’t trust and which we, the people, are daily growing very much more afraid of Amazingly, this same declining nation is waging war against the very basic Christian principles that brought our nation into existence.
Wmston Churchill once said, ”When one generation no longer esteems its own heritage and fails to pass the torch to its children, it is saying in essence that the very foundational principles and experiences that make the society what it is are no longer valid What is required when this happens and the society has lost its way is for leaders to arise who have not forgotten the discarded legacy and who love it with all their hearts?’
We readily recognize those leaders in our society who are steering us to catastrophe, but where are the Christian leaders who will join together in the battle for truth, to rescue this nation from its inevitable ruinous end?
Stanlely Treleaven, Board Member, Virginia Christian Alliance
