Strangers devour our land in the form of massive, taxpayer subsidized immigration and refugee resettlement. In almost any discussion of immigration and refugee resettlement, what’s best for foreigners is always at the fore. The interests of the American people are all but forgotten. It’s as if they don’t exist except to serve as tax donkeys to subsidize their own displacement. When it comes to devouring our land, a local case serves to illustrate this point. In 2017, an illegal immigrant from Mexico was set to be deported from the United States. She entered the U.S. illegally in 2002, was arrested in 2007, and spent the next ten years fighting deportation. After she lost her last appeal, she was – no thanks to the efforts of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati and other Roman Catholic institutions that attempted to stop her deportation – sent back to Mexico in 2017. Less than a year-and-a-half later, her asylum case was reopened, and she was brought back to the U.S. America can’t even deport people here on Temporary Protected Status (TPS). For example, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops successfully lobbied to keep TPS for some 200,000 El Salvadorans who were granted “temporary” status to remain in the U.S. due to a 2001 earthquake in that country. 19 years later, their “temporary” status is still intact. After this much time, it’s fair to ask whether there’s anything temporary about TPS.
Our educational system is broken. According to the most recent figures, America spent an average of $12,800 per student on the elementary and secondary level. That figure rose to $30,000 per student on the post-secondary level. What do we have to show for all this expense? A generation of young people drowning in student loan debt, radicalized in all the latest wokester/cultural Marxist nonsense while lacking skills such that they are unemployable in anything but the most elementary, low paying jobs.
Medical care is broken. This has been dramatically illustrated in the recent coronavirus outbreak, where hydroxycholorquine (HCQ) has shown promise as a treatment for those who have come down with COVID-19. But despite indications that the drug is an effective treatment for the virus if given early on, various pharmacy boards have prohibited or attempted to prohibit its use. This just scratches the surface, of course. The American medical system has been struggling for years with increasing intervention from the government. One of the side effects of this is that once affordable health care has now become prohibitively expense for many.
The family is broken. Citing the Bible, The Westminster Confession tells us that “Marriage is between one man and one woman.” Yet our Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution, which says nothing about marriage, requires same sex marriage, which is not marriage at all, to be recognized throughout the nation. If we can’t get something simple like marriage straight, how can we be expected to get anything else straight? Of course, “same sex marriage” is not the only force destroying the family. The massive levels of fornication, adultery, divorce and out of wedlock births is testament to breakdown of social mores surrounding the family. Feminism, one of the biggest drivers of family breakdown in the 20th and 21st century, continues its work unabated. At times it seems as if there a conspiracy on the part of every cultural and media outlet in this nation to tell men that they are nothing but stupid oafs who need a woman to lead them by the hand to do the simplest of tasks. You-go-girlism rules the land. And yet no one seems interested in thinking about possible relationship between feminism and the plunge in the marriage and birth rates, the rise in divorce and homosexuality and general animosity and dissatisfaction that exists and has existed between men and women for some time. In the nearly sixty years since the inception of Second Wave feminism, women have been encouraged to have careers just as if they were men. This coupled with affirmative action has resulted in a situation where in many cases women are out-earning men. But, and this is baffling to the feminists but not to Christians, women still prefer to marry men who earn more than they do. As Tucker Carlson noted in a segment earlier this year, study after study has shown that when men make less than women, women generally don’t want to marry them.” As Susan Venker noted, “women out-warning men in spades today is a problem because marriage rates decline as a result. Why do you think women continually ask where all the good men have gone?” Although the studies didn’t seem to address this issue, it may well be that men don’t want to marry women who out-earn them. This would make sense. Patriarchy is God’s design for the human race. But how can a man “rule well his own house,” as the Apostle Paul wrote, when his wife is the primary breadwinner? When we’re honest with ourselves, we must admit, men and women both, that a female-ruled society is unnatural and undesirable. Yet this is the very outcome promoted by the elite classes – politicians, academics, ministers, CEO’s – not merely as an acceptable outcome, but as a positive good to be pursued with all our effort.
The Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling that paved the way for same sex marriage throughout America indicates that our legal system is broken as well. The Supreme Court never was intended to be the final arbiter of whether a law was constitutional or not. This power, called judicial review, was an invention of the court dating back to the Marbury v. Madison case all the way back in 1803. Essentially, Marbury v. Madison takes a Roman Catholic approach to the relationship between the Supreme Court and the Constitution. Just as in Roman Catholicism, it is the Church that says what the Bible is, so too under judicial review it’s the Supreme Court that says what the Constitution is. In truth, the opposite is the case. It’s the Bible that says what the church is, and, likewise, it’s the Constitution that says what the Supreme Court is. Judicial review has been undermining our republic for over 200 years. The Obergefell v. Hodges (same sex marriage) decision and Roe v. Wade (abortion) are just two examples of this longstanding trend toward judicial supremacy.
Our culture is an embarrassing sewer. As odd as this seems to me to say, the culture of the 1980’s when I was in high school seemed almost prudish by comparison to what goes on in 2020. The most popular song in the country is one whose title I won’t even mention. It’s just too embarrassing. Pornographic movies, books and internet sites are mainstream entertainment. Violent first-person shooter video games have been all the rage for some time.
The homosexual lobby rules the land. In fact, in the new religion of woke, it seems that nearly every sin may be forgiven except that committed against the LGBTQ community, that viciously persecutes anyone who dares speak against them. So complete is the homosexual lobby’s conquest of America that, upon pain of being drummed out of polite society and losing his job, one is forced to believe with his heart and confess with his mouth that a man can indeed become a woman and a woman can most certainly become a man. If you don’t think so, you, my friend, have major problems.
Business is broken as has been dramatically illustrated by corporate America’s embrace of the Marxist and violent organization Black Lives Matter. Under the aegis of “diversity and inclusion,” American corporations regularly indoctrinate their employees to accept all manner of evil as normal and heathy including homosexuality and transgenderism. American companies regularly support Black Lives Matter and other organizations that hate America. In 2019, Nike cancelled a special edition of one of their shoes featuring the Betsy Ross flag, all because Colin Kaepernick didn’t like it. Not satisfied with selling razors, Gillette decided to attack its target market, men, and white men in particular, with a hectoring, lecturing ad that told them they were the cause of all the trouble in the world. Given their increasing affinity for the agendas of the feminists, the homosexuals and the hard core progressive left, it’s reasonable to conclude that many American businesses hate the very American people whose business they are seeking.
Our financial system is in collapse. The dollar has lost nearly 99% of its purchasing power since the establishment of the Federal Reserve (the Fed) in 1913, and this is not accident. The Fed is of, by and for the bankers, and was set up that way from the beginning. It is an instrument of plunder, one operating quietly in the background stealing wealth from ordinary Americans and funneling it to those who are already wealthy and well-connected. This is not some accidental side-effect of the Fed, it was the intention behind it all along. Yet for all its obvious failings, it manages to operate largely in the shadows, with few people outside of the banking and financial community having any understanding of its evil operations. In short, it is the Fed that is responsible for the increasing cost of living that has made it so difficult for ordinary Americans to pay their bills. It is the Fed that is responsible for the growing wealth gap in this country, which is in turn partly responsible for the growing social unrest and perception – incorrect but still common – that capitalism is a failed economic system and that socialism is the cure for what ails us. In truth, the Fed is not a capitalist institution, but could most accurately be described as a financial fascism.
Most disturbing of all, churches are broken. At its inception, America was a Calvinist nation, but that began to change in the 19th century. First, the Arminian Methodist church and then the Roman Catholic Church took over as the largest denomination in America. Today, the largest Calvinist churches have become synagogues of Satan. For example, the mainline Presbyterian church went liberal as far back as the 1930’s, if not earlier. But it’s not just the liberal denominations that are having problems. Conservative Presbyterian and Reformed churches are struggling to clearly preach the Gospel of Justification by Belief Alone. If supposedly Bible believing churches can’t get the Gospel right 500 years after the Reformation, what hope is there for them to be salt and light to a dying world?
The Present Madness, Where Does It Come From? Where Are We Going?
Time would fail me were I to attempt to outline all the egregious problems facing America today. But the list above is enough to illustrate the point. Our institutions, all of them, are failing, and doing so rapidly and very publicly. This is a society in an advanced state of decay, and one wonders just how much longer it can go on before a major change is forced upon us.
Gordon Clark said this of societal collapse,
At times civil war and barbarian invasion have seriously disturbed the order [of society], but, to quote a les than profound statement, “Society has always survived.” The human race has always survived – so far; but the integrated society, in the sense that there have been several different societies in history, has not always survived. All but one or a few have collapsed. Like a building, providing we can escape the evils of analogy, society is bound together by many girders, beams, joists, and planks. Some of these may loosen without an evident crash; and even after the crash the debris may reveal a number jointed combinations. The termites on one of these jointed pieces may still optimistically believe there has been no collapse. It is this condition that the mid-twentieth century seems to be facing (A Christian View of Men and Things, 53-54, emphasis mine).
As remarkable as it seems, Clark wrote those words back in 1952, a period that many Americans look back on with nostalgia as representing the good old days before insanity seized our nation. And by comparison to 2020, those were the good old days. It raises the question, if American, and Western civilization broadly, was in a state of collapse in 1952, what would Clark say about things as they stand today? Would he call this this a new Dark Ages? Perhaps that’s going a bit far. But at the very least, a few more of those “jointed combinations” have given way and the collapse has continued apace.
Where does the present madness come from? Why do we, heirs of the Reformation possessors of amazing and advanced technology, find ourselves in a state of advanced civilizational collapse? The lack of Christianity, that’s why. John Robbins explains,
Why is Western civilization collapsing? A Christian View of Man and Things presents the argument that the West is disappearing because Christianity [by Christianity Robbins means the doctrines of the Reformation, chiefly, the Gospel of Justification by Faith (Belief) Alone], on which Western civilization was built, has already virtually disappeared in the West. The magnificent superstructure of culture, law, economy, and society that we call Western civilization was built on the foundation of Christian truth. Once belief in that truth was lost – as well as belief n the concept of truth altogether – once the West became atheist or idolatrous, the end of its civilization was inevitable (Clark, A Christian View of Men and Things, 11).
What is the source of the present madness? It’s the same as that of Judah’s decline in the days of Isaiah. We have, in the words of the prophet, “forsaken the LORD” and, “gone away backward.”
Over a long and faithful career, Isaiah warned Judah of the consequences of their faithlessness. They would be destroyed, carried off into captivity he said. Did the people of Judah listen? No, they did not.
So where are we going? What is our fate?
I’m not a prophet as was Isaiah, so I cannot say for sure. What I can say is that just as the men of Judah ignored the counsel of Isaiah and were destroyed, so too do we in the America and in the West face the same outcome unless we repent. We have forsaken the Lord. Our cities are burned with fire and strangers devour our land before our face. We are on a collision course with destruction. The signs are all around us. You’d have to be willfully blind to miss them. God is longsuffering. He was with Israel of old; so he is so with us today. But while God is merciful, know for certain that we are under his judgment.
Will we hear him and repent?
Let us pray that many do.
Lux Lucet 
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