The Great Pillars Of Society: Morality & Religion

"The great pillars of all government and of social life are virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor... and this alone, that renders us invincible." -Patrick Henry, Letter to Archibald Blair, January 8 1799

There is something missing from our republic. It's something obvious, something vital. It brings light to the mind and thoughts of glory into action. Yet it's missing. It's gone somewhere; but where has it gone? It's become a black hole of sorts: a giant vacuum in the heart of the United States. Yet if you watched the television media for hours on end, it would be carefully excluded from the discussion.

An insidious sort of breakdown has occurred. Today they finish off the job, silencing that vacuum. It aches the heart. Because within we can feel it, that a great dignity is neglected. We can sense that the most important part of being a human being has been excluded.

It's what makes society possible. It's what stirs in good men a desire to fight a noble fight and die in the service of a noble cause: It's the human desire to aspire to be better than we are.

A man who is rock solid, standing on his principles, living his life through the eyes of a moral framework is the natural state of the prosperous human. It's the default state of a United States citizen. But something has happened. Something related to the media, something related to public education, something related to warring ideologies, and something related to the war on religious thought.

Undergirding the moral frame within the mind of a man of honor is a dedication to his religion. And by religion, Patrick Henry and George Washington and many others meant the diverse expressions of Christianity through it's various denominational windows.

Something special was born when morality and religion were combined; something incredibly powerful, something that could defeat the British empire, something that could stand against the Nazis, the Soviet Union, great depressions, and natural disasters.

It was the incredible formulation of religious freedom and moral responsibility. They called it liberty; American liberty. A liberty that required vigilance and consistent watchfulness. And it required for every farm hand and iron smith to be educated and actively participating in the preservation of that system.

Flash forward to today and we find our nation mired in the ditch. It's true. For our country has fallen far from it's roots. It's fallen far from the teachings of the founding fathers.

The founding fathers were not perfect, but they were inspired of God. Which is why our system works so well. Of course it's not perfect. But it has functioned very well, for a free society to flourish. Yet we see that our society is beginning to crumble under the weights of moral depravity, economic stagnation, political corruption, and spiritual bankruptcy.

"America is in moral decline as domestic adversaries dismantle our nation's twin pillars of "religion and morality." Christians must unite and fight back or we will certainly lose our religious liberties and basic freedoms! The American Revolution was born from the spiritual foundation of the Great Awakening. Pastors and patriots rose up to fight side by side. We need that resolve again."

-Mathew Staver, Founder and Chairman Liberty Counsel

It's as if we've lost something that we can't quite comprehend. We grasp for it. We can sense it. We can feel it. But we're not allowed to talk about it. And it never comes up in the discussion or in the media.

At some point we as a nation lost focus, we started to drift in a hundred different directions. We drifted away from the truth. Perhaps it was in the glare of pretty lights and dynamic processing machines. Or perhaps it was in the bulbs of the television screens.

"We became so involved and fascinated by the intricacies of television that we found it a little more convenient to stay at home than to come to church. It was an unconscious thing. We didn’t mean to do it. We didn’t just go up and say, now God, you’re gone. We had gone a whole day’s journey, and then we came to see that we had unconsciously ushered God out of the universe. A whole day’s journey-didn’t mean to do it. We just became so involved in things that we forgot about God." -Martin Luther King Jr, 28 Feb 1954, Rediscovering Lost Values

We lost touch with who we are. And who we are is a nation based on a Godly standard. We are a nation who flourished in the strength of the pillars of moral virtue and religious thought. That's something that still holds sway in smaller towns and medium size cities in the United States. But in the violent major cities of our nation, a different dynamic is taking hold. A dynamic based on authoritarian governance for a depraved, selfish human population.