Spiritual Illness

We know what changed, but society just doesn’t want to admit it. It isn’t the things outside us that are the problem, it is the things missing on the inside.

A man who cannot govern himself cannot be governed nor does he have the right to govern others.

The wave of killings in America are not due to mental illness. While mental illness one factor, it has become just an excuse used to deny the real issue. The real issue at hand is spiritual illness.

If you want to see a correlation, I believe you can see one between shootings in general, including these "mass shootings", and the ongoing decline in church attendance and membership.

Far from being one man’s opinion, there are mounds of statistical and social evidence that the very foundations of Western civilization and those of America are eroding and that erosion undeniably parallels the decline of Christian religious beliefs. We now contemplate a future where our grandchildren will be faced with a world where America will be reduced to a footnote, an asterisk in the recorded history of free nations.

I was thinking about this in a general way before the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas.

Here’s Whoopi Goldberg saying out loud and on TV:

"The archbishop of San Francisco is calling for speaker Nancy Pelosi to be denied receiving Communion because of her pro-choice stance ... this is not your job, dude. That is not up to you to make that decision."

Actually Whoopi, that is EXACTLY his job.

And as usual, the Washington Post takes on falling church attendance and membership and gets it completely wrong. Back in March of this year, the Post published an opinion piece by contributor Brian Broome stating:

“Church attendance and membership have long been on the decline in America. My guess is that because many folks realize that fear is at the root of so much religious conviction, the proposition has become untenable. Those fears have led too many people of faith to police the way that others choose to live their lives.

The trend away from church will likely continue. Most of us have enough fear and bullying in our lives already.”

What Goldberg and Broome are saying, very clearly, is this:

“Churches should have no rules or make any judgments. Why does God get to set the standards, especially laws we don’t like? People shouldn’t need to follow rules they don’t like, and they shouldn’t be made to feel bad when they break the rules. We’re a religion of men now, we got this.”

Rather than debate whether man has corrupted the church, perverted God’s laws, and we should consider a reformation on the scale of Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses, there are forces of evil that are turning our churches into social clubs.

A common theory is that the simple march to modernity – greater education, etc. – produces a decline in religious behavior.

Dr. Peter Berger, Professor of Sociology and Theology and Director, Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs, Boston University, spoke at a Pew Research luncheon roundtable in 2005. Dr. Berger stated:

“The other idea one has to put aside is the idea that modernity necessarily leads to a decline in religion. This notion of modernity, for obvious reasons, is an idea very much favored in Europe – modernity leads to secularization, in other words, presumably necessarily. This idea was very widely held by historians and social scientists in my youth, which now seems about 200 years ago. I had the same idea and then had to change my mind, not because of some philosophical or theological change, but because the evidence to the contrary was overwhelming. Modernity does not necessarily lead to a decline in religion. What it does lead to – and the evidence is around us on this – what is does lead to, I think necessarily, is pluralism, by which I simply mean the coexistence within the same society of very different religious groups (you can also apply it to racial or ethnic groups). And this fact has enormous implications, which I can only allude to very briefly.”

Walter Russell Mead, speaking at the same event added another layer of possibility:

“Red state America would draw comparisons between stories in the Hebrew Scriptures and Europe’s reduced religiosity during the idolatrous worship of the nation-state in the late 19th early century leading up to the catastrophe of World War I. The people turned away from worshipping God so He punished them. Did they listen? No. They went from worshipping Him to worshipping the nation state. And when that was seen to fail in World War I, they did not return to God. No, they turned to communism and fascism – even darker forms of idolatry. And then He really whacked them. But did they listen? No.”

The basis for so many ills of society today is the fallacy that man cannot control himself – that he cannot overcome his urge to procreate, to commit crimes, to lie, cheat and steal – and the brilliant answer that society came up with?

Rather than even considering the root of horrendous crimes is spiritual decay, society said:

“Do it if it feels good. You get to judge whether it is right or wrong.”

We are substituting external controls (laws and regulations) for internal controls (a conscience based on morality). Like a law enforcement perspective of terrorism, it only serves to punish after an act. A morally based conscience stops breaches of law (those of God and man) BEFORE the act.

I grew up in a rural town, much like Uvalde, in the 60’s and 70’s where pickups were parked in the high school parking lot with long guns hanging in a rack in the rear window.

There were no school shootings of any kind. Even murders were unheard of even though guns were everywhere.

What changed?

That is rhetorical because we know what changed, society just doesn’t want to admit it.

It isn’t the things outside us that are the problem, it is the things missing on the inside.

To be governed or to have the right to govern others, we must first be able to govern ourselves.

That is what John Adams meant when he wrote:

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

We are fools to think any written law, regulation or ban can stop any person from doing anything if that person doesn’t have the spiritual capacity to know right from wrong, good from evil - and we will continue to fail until we recognize that fact.

As a people, we need a moral code. We need Christianity. We need God.