Losing My Religion
More than a R.E.M. song, it is a significant reason America is sliding toward an uncertain future.
On Christmas Eve Eve in 2011, when we were living in Scotland, I wrote about the closure of Christian churches across Europe in a piece called "Selling the Pews":
"What England is facing is a creeping disease of agnosticism and a liberalized clergy seemingly bent on the destruction of the very Church that they claim to love and serve. The agnosticism is spreading like the medieval Black Plague across continental Europe and washing up on the white cliffs of Dover. This disease is evident in the shrinking of religious affiliation and the closure of churches."
Religion goes, then culture, then the civilization - at least that is my observation - and whether you are religious or even believe in God, you lose at each step of the decline.
I took my truck through the car wash today and just as I came out, my sat radio picked up the broadcast, and R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" was on. As I was driving, strangely enough, a connection between that song and Calvin Coolidge was made as I remembered something I read that Silent Cal said (to be honest, I remembered bits and pieces of it, but I recalled enough to look it up when I got home).
Here's what Silent Cal said:
“Our government rests upon religion. It is from that source that we derive our reverence for truth and justice, for equality and liberality, and for the rights of mankind. Unless the people believe in these principles they cannot believe in our government. There are only two main theories of government in our world. One rests on righteousness and the other on force. One appeals to reason, and the other appeals to the sword. One is exemplified in the republic, the other is represented by despotism.
The government of a country never gets ahead of the religion of a country. There is no way by which we can substitute the authority of law for the virtue of man. Of course we endeavor to restrain the vicious, and furnish a fair degree of security and protection by legislation and police control, but the real reform which society in these days is seeking will come as a result of our religious convictions, or they will not come at all. Peace, justice, humanity, charity—these cannot be legislated into being. They are the result of divine grace.”
I'll finish this out with more from a piece I wrote in September of 2016:
"Whatever your personal beliefs, it is intellectually dishonest to ignore that religion and morality are the basis for the creation of America and that religion and morality draws heavily on Christianity and Christian tenets. America’s very founding principles are based on the idea that our rights do not come from the state, as Thomas Jefferson put it. our rights come from “Nature and Nature’s God.” In every historical case, the substitution of state morality for true morality based on Divine morality has resulted in a total inability for mortal men to discern right from wrong and good from evil – and in every one of these cases, the result was not good – it was pure evil, sanctioned by and perpetrated on behalf of some human derived “plan” for the “greater good.”
C.S. Lewis, the noted author and Christian apologist, wrote:
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.”
In simpler terms, what Lewis is saying is this: Only a good people recognize the difference between right and wrong – a bad people are incapable of differentiating.
One must keep in mind some important distinctions with actual differences. History itself has proven that a) there is a close tie between classical liberalism and Christian teachings and b) to classical liberals (such as John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Lord Acton to name a few), power by itself has always appeared to be a consummate evil, an ever present corrupting force that cannot be destroyed but must be diluted to be survived – but to contemporary collectivists (aka progressives, American liberals, socialists, Marxists and communists), it is something to be courted and concentrated, a goal in and of itself.
I do not believe that every person in America must be a Christian. Christianity is an individual choice, a conversion of the heart; however, in order to maintain the liberty that is so unique to our country, I do believe that America’s basis in Christian principles must be preserved and followed. This is not to say that America must become a theocracy because the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are not theocratic – they are universal statements of a free people.
Hayek was not promoting Christianity when he identified the evil that must be ignored to be a collectivist. He did that from logical deduction based on observations taken in the middle of the horror of Germany’s experiment in the evils of national socialism. History proves that in the modern world, classical liberalism combined with Christian tenets seem to be to be the best (and perhaps only) defense against these evils."
Amen and amen.