OPINION:
The root of socialism is godlessness.
It’s as simple as that; a country that turns from God opens wide the door for government. The Founding Fathers knew this and that’s why they made clear that this new nation, this new experiment, would be based upon a concept put forth in the Declaration of Independence that all are created equal, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and that governments are only instituted to “secure these rights” — not to bestow.
America has lost its way on this point.
Americans, with greater frequency and alarming casualness have jumped aboard the secular bandwagon, bought into the lies of the left — the lies that are packaged with “separation of church and state” stickers and marketed as if religion and faith belong only in the pews, not politics — and let in the scum of socialism.
And Rule No. 1 of the socialist mindset is God must go. Slowly, at first, so as not to alarm, but insistently, persistently, the whisper then call of the good socialist is simply, God does not belong in the public sphere. Soon enough, that becomes: There’s really no need for God at all.
It is no coincidence that polls showing America’s turn from church and flagging belief in God have come hand-in-hand with surveys about the rising generation’s acceptance of socialism as a valid U.S. form of government. All sin is fixable, in the eyes of the socialist. Biblical teachings about the utter failures of humans to live moral, virtuous lives absent a higher power are ridiculous, in the eyes of the socialist.
Why stick with a mindset of humility and penance when Big Government can cure all that ails?
This is the world of the socialist; too, too many in America are buying that line. Sadly, it’s leading to too, too many turns from God and toward government.
As Lee Edwards with The Heritage Foundation put it, in his excellent “What Americans Must Know About Socialism” paper, published in December of 2018: “Christian theology with its idea of a fixed human nature infuriated [socialism’s founder, Karl] Marx, who was not just an atheist but a God-hater who denounced religion as ‘the opium of the people.’ His disciples, led by [Vladimir] Lenin, always targeted the churches when they came to power. They initiated without apology a campaign of terror, shutting down churches, executing priests and bishops and violating nuns. The horrors were justified as part of the class-cleansing Marx envisioned.”
The public schools are failing to teach these facts. The millennials who seem to embrace the redistribute-the-wealth tenets of socialism — the more than 2 million under age 30 who voted for self-declared socialist-minded Sen. Bernie Sanders for president in 2016 — aren’t being taught of the millions who’ve been brutally killed by socialist-slash-communist regimes.
They’re not being taught of the moral disgracefulness of working, working, working for what you possess — only to have it all stripped and given to someone less fortunate, less capable, or more to the truth, less willing to work, more willing to play the victim.
America was to be different. America is supposed to be different.
“The Founders of the American Revolution,” Edwards went on, in his Heritage piece, “rejected those who believed that man was born without any imprint and sided with those who accepted that man was born in the image of God. … The Founders disagreed with those who thought man was perfectible and instead took the Christian position that man’s nature was fallen.”
In other words: In America, freedom and faith go hand in hand.
Big Government cannot survive when the people don’t rely completely on it for answers.
Socialism crumbles in the face of self-reliance, in the insistence on independence, in the demand for recognition that individual rights come from God.
If America wants to know how the likes of a democratic-socialist Sanders became senator and presidential candidate, and a flag-waving socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became congresswoman and near-de facto leader of the House, and how progressivism in all its many politicians’ forms is rising to the top of the Democratic Party, Americans need only look to their local churches.
The empty pews say it all.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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