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A look back over 2016 America reveals an unmistakable reality -- the growing alienation of the nation from God and traditional morality. Poll after recent poll confirms the continuing drift of the United States from a belief in God and traditional values towards a humanist view that promotes radical new views on abortion, homosexuality, gender identity, assisted suicide, human cloning and a host of other issues.
No doubt about it, in the race for the affection and admiration of the general public, God seems to be trailing.
Not surprisingly, society's embrace of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender lifestyles has grown in proportion to the erosion of belief in God and the moral teachings of the Bible. A Gallup poll also conducted in May 2015 showed 53 percent of Americans saying that gay and lesbian lifestyles were morally acceptable.Even belief in God's existence is crumbling, according to the Pew Research Center findings published May 12, 2015. Surveys of 35,000 adults representing a cross section of America, taken from 2007 to 2014, showed Americans who describe themselves as "atheist" or "agnostic" jumping from 16.1 percent to 22.8 percent, a nearly 7 percent rise in just seven years ("America's Changing Religious Landscape,"The Pew Research Center).
Society's embrace of homosexual and transgender lifestyles has grown in proportion to the erosion of belief in God and the moral teachings of the Bible.
State laws outlawing homosexual behavior have been struck down. Homosexual "marriage," a contradiction of terms, is now the law throughout the land, even in states where it's still opposed by the majority of citizens.
Clearly, the nation whose money says "In God We Trust" has largely ceased to respect and follow God's teachings.
How has this happened? One has to go back to the time after the Second World War. For about 20 years after 1945, the nation experienced a time of both sound basic morality and strong economic growth, with morality based on what are described today as "traditional values."
The first major assault came in the mid-1960s. The "Greatest Generation" watched its baby boomer children march off either to college or to war. The college-bound experienced attacks on their belief in God and traditional values by humanist, often atheist, professors. Those slogging through the rice paddies of Vietnam began to question the ethical foundation of the war.
In what became known as "the New Morality," millions of Americans embraced a new lifestyle of free sex, drugs and a general revolt against morality as it had been known. Millions of baby boomers lauded this as long-sought freedom, with no more shackles on free sex or drug use. "If it feels good, do it" became the slogan of the era.
But the consequences of this torrent of illicit sex brought on millions of unwed mothers, illegitimate children, a spike in venereal disease and broken homes. Unrestrained drug abuse brought with it chemical dependency, horrible LSD "trips" and minds permanently damaged.
Traditional morality made somewhat of a comeback in the 1980s as the baby boomers matured, got jobs and started families. A decade that saw the growth of televangelism and Ronald Reagan elected president also showed a resurgence of values.
But by the close of the 20th century, standards began to slide again. Poll after poll documented the shift toward what might today be termed "the Radical New Morality" of acceptance of beliefs and philosophies most would not have tolerated even in the 1970s.
The 21st century has brought a renewed assault on values. With acceptance of evolution and the new god of secular humanism now firmly entrenched in the educational system, America's children have been taught to discard all traditional values and morality as irrelevant and useless. Acceptance of abortion, gay marriage, assisted suicide and even polygamy soared.
Many do not fully understand just how quickly society has changed. With increasing speed, America and the Western world are coming to accept practices and modes of life that were almost universally condemned as evil even in the 1990s.
History has a way of repeating itself. The consequences of this brave new world of total toleration, total license and total freedom make those of the 1960s seem almost tame by comparison.
How did we come to this? Casting God out of the schools was the first step. A series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions beginning with the 1962 and 1963 bans on prayer and the Bible from schools virtually ordered God, the Bible and the Ten Commandments from our public schools. With the Judeo-Christian ethic effectively barred from the K-12 classroom, a generation further indoctrinated by the secular humanism of the college classroom has come to see religious beliefs and traditional values as no longer relevant to the advancement of society.
A nation obsessed with acceptance of every possible lifestyle has forgotten the stern warning of the God it claims to trust: "Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness" (Isaiah 5:20, emphasis added throughout).
The U.S. federal government has made the schools laboratories for social experimentation. In May 2016 the Obama administration, through the Department of Education, issued a directive requiring public schools to allow transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with their "chosen sexual identity."
In other words, a boy who thinks of himself as a girl can now legally enter a girl's bathroom, and vice versa. But nothing in this ruling protects the rights of the vast majority of children who want privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms and who might rightfully be shocked by this behavior.
Though not widely publicized, America's birthrate has dropped below replacement rate. As Forbes reported in early 2015, the official U.S. birthrate per 1,000 women aged 15-44 dropped to 62 per 1,000, the lowest ever recorded, with a fertility rate of 1.87 children over the course of a woman's lifetime ("U.S. Birthrate Falls Again," Jan. 28, 2015).
The widening acceptance of gay and lesbian couples, which cannot produce children, causes some observers to question if this will eventually further slow America's declining overall birthrate.
When the U.S. Supreme Court took up the homosexual marriage issue in 2015, an amicus curiae (friend of the court) paper filed on behalf of opponents of gay marriage stated:
"Redefining marriage in genderless terms breaks the critical conceptual link between marriage and procreation by implicitly endorsing an adult-centric model of marriage, and diluting the implicit encouragement the institution of marriage provides for procreation by married couples. It ignores the inherently generative nature of heterosexual marriages, and sends a powerful message that procreation is not a valued societal priority" (Walter Schumm and Jason Carroll, "How Redefining Marriage Will Make U.S. Birth Rates Fall Even Faster," LifeSiteNews.com, April 29, 2015).
In plain language, the court brief said increasing acceptance of gay and lesbian marriages sends the message that children -- and families -- are no longer a priority in American society. Have we stopped to consider the possible consequences of this attitude?
As Schumm and Carroll, quoted above, further point out: "Redefining marriage could have a profoundly negative impact on the United States' declining fertility rate, which is already below replacement level. This would, in turn, increase the likelihood that the United States would face the same socioeconomic problems that plague other countries with sustained, extremely low fertility rates."
Nations have long recognized that growing populations go hand in hand with national prosperity and security. Since its founding some 240 years ago, America has always enjoyed a steadily rising population and the economic growth that goes along with it. Now economists worry that a possible lack of workers in the near future will jeopardize support of the growing population of retirees -- a problem currently faced by Germany and other European nations with stagnant or declining populations.
The Department of Education's directive on unisex bathrooms casts the spotlight on the transgender movement unlike nothing before it. For most, the fight boils down to the obvious embarrassment most children will face seeing someone of the opposite sex in their bathroom.
But has it been considered what the move to gender-neutral bathrooms does to gender identity during the crucial early years when children become aware of their sexual identity?
As reported in the July-August 2016 issue of Beyond Today , a Johns Hopkins University study found that 70 to 80 percent of children who reported transgender feelings "spontaneously lost those feelings" as they grew older. They simply outgrew them ("Transgender Surgery Isn't the Solution," The Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2014).
This was especially tragic for young people who had undergone transgender surgery. Does it make sense to give young people the radical treatment of puberty-delaying and gender-reassignment hormone therapy in preparation for eventual surgery when the chances are that they will come to see themselves as they were originally born?
It turns out that polygamy also benefits from the growing acceptance of gay and lesbian marriage. The May 2015 Gallup poll also revealed that acceptance of polygamy has more than doubled since 2007, from 7 percent to almost 17 percent.
Inspired by LGBT gains in the courts, polygamists are beginning to push for the "right" to multiple wives or husbands. Though still officially banned nationwide, a 2015 Washington Post story acknowledged that support is increasing.
The Post story cited the role entertainment has played in shaping favorable public opinion on marriage issues, stating: "When Vice President Joe Biden came out in support of same-sex marriage in 2012 ... he said the television show 'Will and Grace' probably did more to educate the public than almost anything else. There's an argument to make that 'Sister Wives' has done the same for polygamists" ( The Washington Post, July 2, 2015). The TV series Sister Wives, a reality TV show, features the real-life family of Cody Brown, with his four wives and their 18 children.
But if "equality" is the issue here, polygamy flies in the face of the notion of a society that wants to think of itself as becoming more equal. Will the ultimate in toys of the rich include a collection of wives? Will "harems" come into vogue?
Seeing the tidal wave of progressive, liberal thought sweeping the nation, even conservatives seemingly shrug their shoulders and admit to what is coming. Conservative columnist Ross Douthat had this to say in The New York Times: "Is a culture where prominent men routinely have multiple kids with multiple wives across multiple decades going to permanently deny marriage rights to people who want the same thing, except all at once?" ("The Prospects for Polygamy," July 30, 2015). In his opinion, polygamy might become the law of the land as early as 2040.
One can also easily imagine how this destroys the bond between parents and children. A child would know his or her mother, but would grow up learning that the father merely provided the sperm and perhaps little else.
The same May 2015 Gallup poll referred to earlier revealed that 68 percent of Americans support assisted suicide, specifically that "doctors should be legally allowed to assist terminally ill patients in committing suicide." This figure represented a 10 percent increase in this view from just one year ago. Very eye-opening was the statistic that an even greater majority, 81 percent, of the 18-34 age group support this form of euthanasia.
What does this portend for the future? At present, euthanasia is done when a person requests it, typically one suffering from terminal illness. But it takes little imagination to foresee a future in which laws will mandate that many considered "not fit to live" could have their lives ended against their will.
Again, history repeats itself. It was in 1939, during the lives of many still living today, when Adolf Hitler had laws passed in Germany that mandated euthanasia for the mentally handicapped, the insane, those with incurable diseases and others whose lives the Nazis felt "were not worth living."
Is widespread acceptance of assisted suicide the first step down that path? Is growing support of assisted suicide merely the first step in the coarsening of regard for human life? Will it come to be accepted that when Grandpa and Grandma become too much of a burden, we simply give them the pills or lethal injection to "put them out of their misery"?
Science has made vast strides in the area of cloning, where a cell from a living creature is used to make copies of that creature. It jumped into American consciousness in 1996 with the creation of Dolly the sheep at the Roslin Institute in Midlothian, Scotland, cloned from a cell of another female sheep.
Seeing the possibilities for a source of replacement human organs, a drive in the medical world to advance cloning is taking shape. But where might this lead? A growing number of scientists have come out against cloning, in part because we can't foretell where this Frankenstein monster may end up.
In Greek mythology, a chimera was a creature made up of several animal types. The news media have picked up on this word to describe the creation of human organs inside of animals for the purpose of harvesting those body parts as replacements for those of human beings.
Now some scientists and medical researchers want to go even further. Their goal is development of human embryos, and perhaps even fully developed infants, so their organs can be "harvested" for organ transplants.
Other scientists foresee a future in which "made to order" human beings will be conceived in test tubes, complete with whatever set of genetics the parents may choose for them. Parents could choose not only the sex of the child, but skin color, hair color and other physical traits. They might even pay extra to order customized test-tube children with superior intelligence or athletic skills.
How about one million Einstein clones walking around in the year 2050 ?
Let us mentally fast forward to the world of 2050 -- just 33 years from now -- if present trends continue. In a society where the God of the universe has been replaced by the false god of humanism, what would things look like?
Perhaps this:
Total devotion to the comfort and convenience of adults at the expense of the unborn and the very old is now the rule. Continued abortion on demand destroys millions more unborn human lives, while widespread euthanasia eliminates most of the old and diseased.
Complete sexual freedom of every type extended to everyone allows marriage of men to men, women to women, men to multiple wives, women to multiple husbands, and men and women to multiple people of both sexes (assuming people are still defined by gender). People might even be allowed to marry animals -- or "non-human citizens."
With cloning having eliminated the need for marriage to create children, "marriage" (if the term still exists) has degenerated into whatever type of relationship a person desires.
Total acceptance of cloning has created millions of human beings that look and act very much alike, due to having been custom ordered in the test tube. On the other extreme, millions of unfortunate human clones have been created for the purpose of harvesting organs for the fortunate Master Race.
Religion has almost totally disappeared. Church buildings in urban centers have been torn down to make way for high-rise lofts, with perhaps a few preserved as museums. (The only exception might be a massive increase in radical Islam -- tolerated out of fear and to help keep Christianity in decline.)
A frightening picture, indeed. As individuals, we cannot stop this mad, headlong rush to this Brave New World. But each of us can take control of our own lives and choose not to be a part of this insanity that mankind is trying to bring upon itself in the name of progress.
In a parallel to our times, the God of the Bible (whose existence can be proven ) told ancient Israel: "This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live" (Deuteronomy 30:19, NIV).
Here, then, is the crucial question: Are you shocked and dismayed at what you see going on around you? Or are you simply resigned to this tidal wave of wholesale breakdown of values disguised as "social change"? As pointed out earlier, most Americans agree with these social changes and are not worried about the consequences.
But perhaps you're one of those who "sigh and cry over the abominations" you see occurring around you (Ezekiel 9:4). Perhaps you read the news, observe changes in society and shake your head at what you see happening. You'd like to make a difference.
The good news is that a better world is coming. The same Bible that prophesied these conditions of today also reveals the coming of One who has the power to clean up this mess. You can be part of the movement to spread the news. You can be part of the solution, not the problem!
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