Over The Last 80 Years, We Have Witnessed The Dismantling Of Our Society’s Christian Foundation
April 12, 2025
By David Reagan
Reprinted from Harbinger’s Daily
Our society has continued to slouch toward Gomorrah.
Let me take a moment to emphasize to you how serious the decay of our society has become. I think this is essential because we have become insensitive to it. Only a person my age (86) can appreciate how radically and how quickly our society has disintegrated.
It was emphasized to me recently when I saw a photo taken in New York City on the eve of Easter in 1956. All the skyscrapers were lit up on their sides with huge crosses which were made by lighting offices. At that very same time in the mid-1950s Congress added the words “one nation under God” to our pledge of allegiance. And Congress adopted “In God We Trust” as our national motto.
Now, all three of the things I just mentioned would be unthinkable today. In fact, there are members of Congress who would like to revoke the legislation, just as there are those who desire to replace our national anthem with John Lennon’s tribute to atheism in his song, ‘Imagine.”
I was born in 1938 when autos still had running boards and gasoline was 20 cents a gallon. When I was born. . .
- Abortionists were sent to prison.
- Pregnancy out of wedlock was thought of as scandalous.
- Homosexuality was considered unnatural, immoral, and sinful.
- Pornography was despised as a perversion.
- Drugs were something you bought at a drugstore.
- Marriage was sacred. Living together was taboo. Divorce was a disgrace.
- Same-sex marriage was beyond even the wildest and most depraved imaginations.
- There were only two genders — male and female — and people knew what a woman was. Homemaking was honored, and day care was provided by mothers in their homes. Child abuse was unheard of.
- Ladies did not curse or smoke.
- The word “damn” was considered flagrant language in a movie. That word was first used in “Gone with the Wind” in 1939. In 2013, a film called “The Wolf of Wall Street,” starring Leonardo de Caprio, had the “f-word” in it 544 times in 180 minutes!
Television
When television began to spread nationwide in the 1950s, there were strict codes of conduct for the producers of television programs. Over the years since that time, those codes have eroded to the point that almost anything is allowed on TV today.
The contrast is stunning. When I was growing up in the 1950s, we watched wholesome programs like “The Life of Riley,” “I Love Lucy,” “Gunsmoke,” “Dragnet,” and “Father Knows Best.” All these programs taught basic Judeo-Christian moral values.
Today, the channels are flooded with morally depraved reality shows like “The Bachelorette,” with demented dramatic series like “Criminal Minds,” with brutally lurid shows like “Dexter,” with sex-laden situation comedies like “Two and a Half Men,” with amoral programs like “Breaking Bad,” and with programs that are constantly pushing the homosexual agenda.
Vulgarity
Another societal problem is vulgarity, which has become commonplace. This growing evil has even been recognized by secular media. For example, in May of 1990, Time magazine carried a cover story decrying vulgarity. On the cover was this headline: “DIRTY WORDS: America’s foul-mouthed pop culture.” That was over 30 years ago!
Even farther back, in the 1980s, entertainer Steve Allen lamented the growing depravity of American entertainment when he observed: “We have become a society where vulgarians entertain barbarians.”
Schools
The radical change in our society can perhaps best be illustrated by what has happened to our schools. I started the first grade in 1945 and completed high school in 1956. During that time, I was never exposed to any drugs. Today, kids are confronted with them at the elementary school level.
When I was a kid, we began each day at school with Bible readings and prayer. We put on Easter pageants and Christmas plays. Our English readers consisted of Bible stories, with a moral taught at the end.
When I graduated from high school in Waco, Texas, in 1956, there were about 100 pickup trucks in the parking lot on any given day, and most of them had gun racks that held a deer rifle, a shotgun, and a 22 rifle. No one was concerned about anyone misusing one of those guns. We had been raised to respect and practice Judeo-Christian morals. Today, we have guns in the hands of moral pygmies who are willing to shoot each other over a pair of tennis shoes.
The most dramatic way I can think of to illustrate how rapid the deterioration of society has become in America is to consider the results of a survey concerning public school discipline problems. The survey was conducted by the Fullerton, California Police Department in conjunction with the California Department of Education. It was conducted first in the mid-1940s and then again 40 years later in the mid-1980s. Consider the differing results, and weep! (Source: Time Magazine, February 1, 1988).
The Top Public School Discipline Problems in the mid-’40s:
- Talking
- Chewing gum
- Making noise
- Running in the halls
- Getting out of turn in line
- Wearing improper clothing
- Not putting paper in wastebaskets
The Top Public School Discipline Problems in the mid-’80s:
- Drug Abuse
- Alcohol Abuse
- Pregnancy
- Suicide
- Rape
- Robbery
- Assault
Jim Garlow’s Analysis
A few years ago, I heard a presentation by Jim Garlow, the former pastor of Skyline Wesleyan Church in La Mesa, CA. He is considered to be one of Christendom’s foremost Church historians. In his presentation, Pastor Garlow presented a sweeping overview of the relationship between Bible-believing Christians and American society:
- 1607 – 18233 — The Establishment (236 years)
- 1833 – 1918 — The Predominant Force (85 years)
- 1918 – 1968 — The Sub-dominant Force (50 years)
- 1968 – 1988 — A Sub-culture (20 years)
- 1988 – 1998 — A Counter Culture (10 years)
- 1998 – 2008 — An Antithetical Culture: in full opposition to the predominant values of the culture (10 years)
- 2008 – Present — A Persecuted Culture
One of the main reasons for this trend is because the number of Christians in our society has plummeted:
- In 1956, 91% of Americans claimed to be Christians.
- Today, that number has fallen to 61%. And keep in mind that many professing Christians today are merely Cultural Christians who know little, if anything, about the Bible.
- Likewise, weekly church attendance has plummeted from 63% in the 1950s to 16% today.
In fact, a recent poll revealed that only 9% of Americans in general can be classified as Bible-believing. And only 17% of professing Christians can be certified as Bible-believing.
Christian Persecution
Another indicator of the collapse of American society is to be seen in the persecution of true, Bible-believing Christians. It has increased exponentially in the last 15 years.
In 2014, Todd Starnes published the book “Godless America.” He presented 89 horrendous examples of the persecution of Christians.
In 2021, when Florida Congressman Greg Steube quoted Scripture to object to a pending piece of legislation that endorsed transgenderism, Congressman Jerry Nadler of New York, who was then the powerful chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, responded by saying, “What any religious tradition describes as God’s will is no concern of this Congress.”
In April of 2021, an editorial in the Los Angeles Times was headlined, “Why America’s Godlessness is Good News for the Nation.” In part, it read: “The organic secularization we are experiencing in the United States is a progressive force for good, one that is associated with improved human rights, more protections for planet Earth and an increased socio-cultural propensity to make this life as fair and just as we can — in the here and now — rather than in a heavenly reward that fewer and fewer of us believe in.”
We are literally witnessing the dismantling of the Christian foundation of our society. The gravity of the situation was recently summed up by Albert Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, with these words: “We are witnesses to one of the most comprehensive and fast-paced moral revolutions ever experienced by humanity. The velocity and breadth of this revolution are breathtaking, and the consequences are yet incalculable. This society is dismantling the very structures that have allowed for the enjoyment and preservation of human liberty and respect for life.”
Our Response
How are we to respond to this downward spiral of American society and to the increasing persecution of Christians?
One way is to ignore it. Believe it or not, there are Christian spokesmen who say that we, as Christians, are to focus on only one thing: Evangelism. They argue that the collapse of society is not our concern. I believe this is a very unbiblical attitude. We are called by Jesus to be the salt and light of the world (Matthew 5:13-16), and the only way we can fulfill that task is to take a stand for righteousness.
Other professing Christians have decided to embrace the decline of society by getting in bed with it — by endorsing immorality in the name of tolerance and Christian love. After all, they say, “Who are we to judge, and shouldn’t we make Christianity as user-friendly as possible, free of all condemnation?”
Let me give you an example of this fuzzy-headed type of thinking. One of our nation’s well-known Evangelical pastors recently said that he believes Christian businesses should be forced under penalty of law to offer their services for homosexual weddings. He explained his view by saying, “Serving people we don’t see eye to eye with is the essence of Christianity.”
This incredible statement is terribly wrong in many ways; I will mention two in particular. It ignores the fact that the Constitution of the United States in the First Amendment guarantees the free exercise of religion. It is totally unbiblical because it is not the essence of Christianity to help other people commit sins.
A third response to the collapse of our society, and the biblical one, is to take a stand for righteousness against the tide of filth. A sterling example of a person who is doing that is Franklin Graham. Here is what he has to say about same-sex marriage:
“True followers of Jesus Christ, whose salvation is based entirely upon God’s Word, cannot endorse same-sex marriage, regardless of what our President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the media, or the latest Gallup poll says about the matter.
This moral issue has been settled by God Himself and is not subject to man-made revisions or modifications. In the end, I would rather be on the wrong side of public opinion than on the wrong side of Almighty God, who established the standard of living for the world He created. Marriage is a biblically moral issue, not a political or theological one.
This debate is ultimately about something much more important than the question of same-sex marriage. It is about… the authority of Scripture
There are many things in Scripture that Christians disagree on, but the Bible is crystal clear about the sanctity of life and marriage. It is also clear that homosexuality is spelled out as a sin — there are no ifs, and, or buts!”
Don Wildmon
Every time I speak of standing for righteousness, I think of one of my heroes in the faith, Don Wildmon, the founder of the American Family Association. He spoke out boldly for years against the moral decline of our nation.
He told me once that his greatest detractors were pastors who wrote to him and taunted him by saying, “You are spinning your wheels and wasting your time. Think of it — you have been opposing the immorality in our nation for years, and it just keeps getting worse. You are not winning.”
His response: “God did not call me to win; He called me to stand. We will not win until Jesus returns. But in the meantime, we must stand!”
The bottom line is that if we Christians do not stand for righteousness, no one will. And we are specifically called to do so. Again, in Matthew 5, in His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus called His followers to be “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world.”
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