It cannot be stated enough. America’s decline is directly connected to the American people turning from God, from the truth of the Word of God. To our own ways, which are sinful and at enmity with God. Hundreds of thousands of words are written or spoken about what ails America and why America is in decline. Many of those words sound to the mind reading or hearing them to make sense, but none of those words, unless they state the true cause of our nation’s decline directly tied to our love of sin, our insatiable appetite for evil, and our serving other gods, denying the One True God, mocking the Lord, perverting and corrupting the Word of God to fit worldly agendas rather than us submitting to God’s Word as it is written and meant to be understood — none of the endless multitude of words matter. Unless we begin at the true source of our decline. Which no one wants to address.

Rather, it’s all secular. Men and women claim they have the answers, they know the solutions. Yet if any omit God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Word of God in their speech they have nothing of worth to say or write. Not really. For they are only saying or writing what almost all others are saying or writing. It is all empty unless God, Jesus, and the inerrant infallible Word of God are included in the equation, the discussion.

No matter how brilliant in human terms the writer or speaker, no matter if what is heard or read aligns with our individual earthly beliefs if we’re not going to the root cause of everything — every ill and problem being the sinful state of our people and our turning from God — no matter who says or writes what have you it all is dross. Spew. Hot air. Opinions bantered about among the contentious, the divisive, the angry, the apathetic, and the otherwise occupied.

There is one primary cause for the state of decline America is in. Our turning from God.

The following was written by Moses and directed to the Israelites who are God’s people, those He brought out of Egypt and made free and prosperous.

I am not one to alter Scripture but remove and add only a couple of words and the following is true of America and directly applies to our nation, a nation chosen by God to be created. A people brought out against odds no one imagined could be overcome by Divine Providence to freedom. A beacon to the world. Founded, contrary to present lies attempting to discredit and dismantle America’s history, by men and women who were overwhelmingly God-fearing, Bible reading and literate, Bible fluent believers in God, in Jesus, and exhibited their Christian faith through the living out of their lives.

And America prospered unlike any nation previous. Not even the so-called great cultures of the past could compare to how blessed America was and what the people of our nation accomplished in a very short historical timeline.

And the following applies to U.S., to our nation in decline almost word for word;

“Take care lest you forget the LORD your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock, who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end. Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ You shall remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day. And if you forget the LORD your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish. Like the nations that the LORD makes to perish before you, so shall you perish, because you would not obey the voice of the LORD your God.”

Deuteronomy 8:11-20

None of the proposed solutions or diagnoses of what ails America and what it will take to heal the diseased nation holds any worth from anyone that omits God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Word of God. That speaks of our blatant disobedience and idol worship. Our turning to false teachers and increasing sin. Not one word written or spoken that refuses to address these things really matters. They are like feeding one cooked pea to a malnourished giant with a terminal disease in need of healthy food in order to be healed and to prosper. Without the right food, the body dies.

The American people feast on a diet of lies, delusion, banality, illusion, and what only a handful of years ago would be relegated to insanity.

Empty words are like empty calories ingested.

Our love of sin, our love of wickedness, our love of lies and self. Our love of fleeting pleasures, of immoralities, of what we deem is wealth that only robs us of our spirit and soul unless we acknowledge where all wealth comes from and Who made it possible.

Yes, we are Deuteronomy 8:11-20. Only instead of being brought out of Egypt we were brought out of religious persecution, tyranny in other lands, a lack of opportunity, a lack of freedoms, a lack of religious freedom to openly worship the One True God, to have, hold, and read and study the Scriptures — which were the foundation and basis of teaching reading in American schools for much of our early years as a nation — to now turn from God, turn from Jesus, deny the Holy Spirit and the power and Authority, the Sovereignty of God, refusing to believe, submit and obey as we corrupt and pervert the Word to suit our current wickedness.

Is it any wonder why America has been in decline and America is plummeting swiftly into ever further decline?

This is NOT about politics, any elections, nor any individual politician or political party. This is about our alienation from and disobedience to God!

Yes, if enough people were open and wrote to or called their representative’s offices and plainly, openly, unabashedly without hyperbole stated succinctly their beliefs to their representatives it could begin to affect those representative’s realities as to what we the people believe and want to see occur in this nation.

But politics, a political party, a politician, or an election is the solution to our problems. If paying attention every person must concur that no matter who is placed in office everything only erodes, rots, puts off the stench of decay, and no politician — even ones who have been in office and seek reelection, or the newly elected making all manner of promises — none of them are the solution or the answer and until and unless individuals acknowledge and begin to openly, continually voice and write where, why, what, and who are the sources of our problems and what, and Who are the only real solutions and why that is and what it is really all about and what is really going on everything will continue to atrophy. Implode.

Because the people have been given over. Already. Just as in Romans 1. And it will take the soldiers of Christ in this escalating spiritual war to effect any advancing and pushing back the Enemy, the Evil One, and his footsoldiers and forces.

We’re at war. The greatest, longest, and highest causality war in history. Yes, it’s brutal. It’s tiring. But unless fighting the good fight, sound in the Word, bold in the Word, and in the faith standing firm in the Word not wavering and advancing the gospel in this raging darkness with the stench of death in the air — until and unless the true soldiers of light and truth speak and write that the Way out of decline is to go to the Light, the only source of Truth, and the only Way to Life — the Lord Jesus Christ, making Him preeminent in our lives?

Well, everything else is really just hot air. Not a solution. Of less value than dung. Really.

Ken Pullen, A CROOKED PATH, Wednesday, April 19th, 2023

Can We Do Anything About America’s Decline?

The remedies are agreed upon, but the needed medicine is feared more than the disease. Because today, the government is the cause of our many crises.

April 16, 2023

By Victor Davis Hanson

Reprinted from American Greatness

Twenty-first-century America was on a trajectory of gradual decline—until it began to implode.

Was the accelerant the COVID-19 pandemic and unhinged lockdowns? Or was the catalyst the woke revolution fueled by the 2020 summer of exempted rioting, looting, arson, and violence? Or was it perhaps the deranged fixation on removing Donald Trump from the presidency and destroying the rule of law in the process? Or all that and more?

Now with the election of Joe Biden, what had been a fast-tracked decline has accelerated at such an astonishing rate we can scarcely recognize our country.

Our largest cities are becoming uninhabitable—dilapidated, dangerous, and dysfunctional. The challenge is not just rampant crime, but the realization that if you, the citizen, are stabbed, shot, or beaten up on the street, the perpetrators may well be exempt from most punishments. And the victim either will be forgotten in his misery or, indeed, blamed for bringing such violence upon himself.

Urban schools are not places of instruction anymore. That fact is accepted by teachers’ unions, whose operative principle seems to be that the more hopeless the idea of educating urban youth is understood to be, the less burdensome the workload, and the greater their hazardous duty pay.

Urban chain stores are closing down on the principle that if police cannot or will not stop consumer violence and theft, then consumers there should not have any store to buy anything, anyway. If there is no store, how can it be looted or shop-lifted?

The only mystery remaining is how long these Democrat-controlled, racially charged, and corrupt municipalities can sustain their budgets and pension commitments with increasingly declining revenue. One can tax the well off, and perhaps even gouge them as California does. But one cannot insult and ridicule them in the process. Being highly taxed is one thing, being highly taxed while hated is quite another.

How eerie that medievalism—defecting, urinating, fornicating, injecting in the street—is relabeled “homelessness—as if the problem is merely a shortage of apartments or tent cities. Somehow cities developed the notion that it was crueler to be told not to pull down one’s pants and defecate in the street than it was for a pedestrian to step into infectious human excrement.

In the next five years, either cities will seek new governance to reduce taxes, break up municipal unions, mandate charter schools, restore police funding and manpower, recalibrate pensions, and prosecute criminals and corrupt officials—or Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and a score of others will become Detroit.

One of the strangest phenomena amid our current debility are the millions of affluent leftists and liberals who have fled their unworkable, now unlivable blue-run, but naturally beautiful cities like San Francisco or Portland. They seem to lack an abstract recognition why they are leaving, or why and how their new chosen destinations are so different and therefore so inviting to them. Is their motto, “I am fleeing what I created, but I still hate those who created what I want”?

To have a “border problem,” one must have a border. The United States has no southern border.

Upwards of 7 million illegal entries since the Biden inauguration are proof enough of that tragedy. Mexico brags that 40 million have come into the United States. It urges them to vote Democratic. And it relies on still more illegal entries to ensure yearly increases in its current $60 billion in remittance income sent from its expatriates in the United States. The donors apparently grow fonder of Mexico—the more they are safely distant from it.

America could close the border tomorrow and actually “make Mexico pay for the wall” by simply slapping a 10 percent export tax on all remittances sent to Mexico. Or we could make it illegal to send money out of the country if one is receiving federal subsidies and aid. Or we could fine employers for hiring those who are here illegally. Or, as a deterrent to future illegal entries, we could immediately deport all who illegally entered and reside in the United States—if they came within the last five years, or if they have a criminal record, or if they are not working and are on public assistance.

The result would not just be a restoration of American sovereignty, and decline in spiraling social service costs. There would follow better relations with Latin America and Mexico. Both treat us with contempt as a hectoring weakling because, unlike themselves, we do not believe in our own physical space, our own borders, and our freedom to do as we please rather than what others tell us to do.

Abroad, our allies and neutrals are distancing themselves from America—France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, India, Turkey, South Korea—on the Ukraine War, China, the dollar as the global currency, and our popular culture.

Why? Our increasingly former friends conclude it is now dangerous to ally openly with the United States and for a variety of reasons:

1) They see the once indomitable United States as weak—as a possible liability rather than an asset. After China’s balloon surveillances, the Afghanistan flight, the inability to achieve strategic victory after intervening in Iraq and Libya, the current embarrassing Pentagon leak, the Anchorage mini-summit, the woke obsessions in the U.S. military, and the inability to ensure its military is well-staffed, apolitical, and equipped with the world’s most plentiful and cutting-edge weaponry, allies assume that the United States will not necessarily win any intervention it undertakes but may well drag them down with it.

2) The United States may suddenly turn on an ally, demonize it, and refuse to meet with its leaders, as Biden gratuitously maligned Saudi Arabia and Israel.

3) America asks allies to join its cause of the day regardless of whether it is in those nations’ own interest. So South Korea, Japan, India, or Egypt do not believe boycotting Russian oil or openly selling Ukraine weapons is necessarily in their interests

4) Our woke revolution is so volatile, irrational, and unpredictable that allies never know when they will be accused of being homophobic, transphobic, racist, or sexist and treated accordingly—or whether the United States will be eternally crippled by internal woke dissension and civil unrest.

5) The allies do not believe the United States can keep secrets, especially after the latest leak. From the Dobbs draft leak and the Comey leak of a confidential conversation with President Trump to the Vindman-Ciaramella-Schiff impeachment psychodrama leaks to Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, leakers and “whistleblowers” feel there are few consequences to leaking classified information (unless it is embarrassing to leftist administrations), or indeed leaking to the media to overturn institutions and presidencies.

America must reform the entire Pentagon process of spending and appropriations. It must end woke and identity politics, ideological indoctrination, and return to a meritocracy. It should prohibit retiring generals and admirals from revolving into defense contractor boards and lobbyists. It should finally enforce the Uniform Code of Military Justice that prohibits active and retired high-ranking officers from publicly attacking their current commander-in-chief. It should charge leakers with felonies and prosecute perjury. Had the government done that with Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, James Comey, and James Clapper the accruing deterrence would have discouraged others with lower profiles.

Biden is on schedule to run up a $2 trillion annual deficit, adhering to the Bush, Obama, and Trump legacy of unfettered spending. In Biden’s case, he insanely printed over $4 trillion at a time when labor participation rates were already in decline, COVID-suppressed demand was returning, and transportation and production interruptions were reducing supply. He raised taxes, increased regulations, cut projected increases in gas and oil production, and canceled energy projects. The result was the highest inflation in 40 years, near-record energy costs, soaring interest rates, the largest modern percentage of debt to GDP at 130 percent, the greatest debt in our history at $33 trillion, and stagnant GDP. All that and more prompt the current Chinese-led effort to dethrone the dollar as the world’s currency.

The remedies are agreed upon, but the needed medicine is feared more than the disease. Our elected leaders know we must, but never even attempt to, cut spending, reduce the size of the federal government radically, simplify the tax code and reduce taxes, deregulate, recalibrate Medicare and Social Security, develop our mineral, gas, and oil resources, and require labor participation for able-bodied entitlement recipients.

Never have Americans spent more on K-12 and higher education and never have they received less in return. The education industry is woke and nonmeritocratic. Research is diverted, sidetracked, and polluted by ideological commissars, endangering the U.S. lead in science, math, engineering, and the professions. Even scientists have become deductive, starting out with a preconceived woke conclusion they feel will win influence, grants, and notoriety and then scrambling to warp evidence to fit it.

The solutions are straightforward. Tax university endowment income—and lots of superfluous and harmful programs will vanish.

Stop federal student loan guarantees, and soaring tuition and room-and-board costs will decline to the annual rate of inflation once universities must guarantee their own student loans.

Require universities that receive federal funds of any sort to honor existing laws from the Bill of Rights to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That would end segregated dorms and graduations. The next time administrators at Stanford or San Francisco State either aid or ignore student efforts to shout down or disrupt speakers and suppress free expression, their institutions should quickly be fined by the U.S. government or have their federal funding yanked.

If SAT and ACT entrance tests are being abolished, then they could be rebooted as exit tests required for a bachelor’s degree analogous to a bar exam. With such minimum standards, we might ascertain what, if anything, students had learned upon graduation. College graduates should be able to choose between an academic master’s degree or the school of education credential to teach K-12. Most would flee the latter option. Right-to-teach laws and the end to mandatory teacher union dues, along with the end of tenure and its replacement by five-year contracts with required minimum standards of achievement, would all bring some accountability to what is now an entirely unaccountable profession.

Race is no longer an accurate barometer of either victimhood or legitimate grievance. If “affirmative” action were to continue, it should be based entirely on class considerations, not the current system of Elizabeth Warrenesque fakery or delusions that the elite children of Eric Holder, the Obamas, the Duchess of Sussex, or LeBron James are in some need of compensatory privilege for college admissions, appointments, or hiring.

Because America is now multiracial, with untold ethnic and racial agendas, and countless and contorted collective grievances, it is impossible to sort out victimizers and victims. Junk the entire illiberal and patently illegal system of racial discrimination, and there would be an organic return to merit, and with it, race would become incidental, not essential to American identities. After 1964, it seems Orwellian that liberal institutions could continue to assign dorms by race, segregate graduations, and impose racial requisites to participate in special program

America’s former strength—the most transparent, accurate, and trustworthy elections in the world—have descended into its greatest liability. In the space of a mere eight years, and especially in reaction to radical political changes made under the cover of the COVID lockdown, we have gone from 70 percent of the electorate in most states voting on election day to a mere 30 percent. Yet the ballot rejection rate somehow diminished, with the flood of non-Election-Day ballots that overwhelmed accustomed audit and verification.

Election night is a mere construct. It is mostly meaningless. Local, state, and federal election results are stalled and descend into days, weeks, and sometimes even months of bickering, counter charges of ballot tampering and fraud, ballot harvesting and curing, and a loss of confidence in the integrity of the final result. Debates mean little anymore, once a large portion of the electorate has already voted. No wonder deceased candidates can win. Gaffes are now determined by whether they occur before or after the majority of voters has cast their ballots.

There should be a national uniform standard that allows states to set their ballot procedures—as long as they result in 70 percent of the electorate voting in person on election day.

America is in a similar position to where it was in 1861, 1929, 1941, and 1968—only perhaps worse, given in all those cases, there was at least a president and Congress that identified and reacted to the crisis, whereas today our elected government is what caused the crisis.

About Victor Davis Hanson