Thomas Jefferson, often characterized as a deist, once opined, "God who gave us life, gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?"
America's Founding Fathers understood that there are two things that are sacred in this world: God and people. Rejecting God will result in our nation's destruction.
Money follows morality. The money-saving efforts of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) notwithstanding, how we spend money — or don't spend it — is a reflection of what we value as a nation.
President Donald Trump's reelection by popular vote, including sweeping all the swing states, represents an election mandate to "save our country and restore America to greatness." That mandate presumes a value system.
Is America's greatness rooted in a rosy financial prospectus or even merely saving us from further losses? Or is financial prosperity a lagging indicator of something deeper, more durable, and honorable than filthy lucre?
Staunching America's financial hemorrhage is a good thing. But Jesus likens a generation of people who attempt to oust the evil in their midst without replacing it with God to a demon-possessed man, freed temporarily from his oppression.
The evil spirit "passes through waterless places" and not finding rest says, "'I will return to my house from which I came' and when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself ... and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first" (Matthew 12:43-45).
The basic unit of an economy is not a dollar. It is a person.
People are producers, innovators, and creators.
But the basic unit of a strong society is the family, the cradle of civilization, the womb of the future, the institution that bears and rears the next generation of responsible citizens. So what happens when the majority of society no longer sees it that way?
Marriage rates plummet 54% and fertility rates hit historic lows of 1.6, far below the replacement rate of rate of 2.1.
There is no sustainable economic model for a flat or declining population. If a man and a woman view marriage as a sentimental device for mutual happiness, then people will push off marriage until later, divorce more readily, and have fewer children.
And that is exactly what is happening.
Eliminating waste and cutting taxes may encourage that extreme minority of couples who are already inclined to sacrifice their time and money for a progeny to have baby No. 5. But the majority will remain unmoved from their belief that children are far from a blessing.
Instead, they become a financial burden, a drain on the priority of personal pleasure-seeking.
And therein lies the rub. We've replaced God, making him in our own image.
We've been teaching our children for generations that they are a cosmic Darwinian accident, with no purpose, going nowhere. Any moral framework is seen as patriarchal control, keeping you from a pleasure-filled future driven by absolute personal autonomy.
Autonomy is the only core value of the modern secular religion.
But absolute personal autonomy is a moral blight. Some 340 million people pursuing the what's-in-it-for-me morality is the recipe for social collapse.
Men who insist they are women and women who insist they are men (all needing reparative therapy); an educational system that sexually abuses elementary school children through X-rated curricula; states that undermine parental rights through genital mutilation and experimental hormone therapy, abortion, surrogacy, the Wild West of in vitro fertilization, etc. — all of this results in and contributes to the undermined family and, therefore, civilized order.
We've forgotten the one truth that is the basis for human flourishing: All people are made in the image of God and, therefore, are infinitely valuable. And the first institution to ensure this is the family: male dad, female mom, along with their male boys and female girls.
That I even needed to articulate it that way should be enough of a red flag.
President Trump can get the financial house in order and purge the government of malevolent actors. Congress can help by safeguarding many of his executive orders through legislation.
But absent the clarion call for revival emanating from the church, beckoning the people to repent and return to God in Christ, those actors will return with a vengeance and, as Jesus warns, our last state will be seven times worse than the first.
The Rev. Jim Harden is CEO of CompassCare, an anti-abortion medical network based in Buffalo, New York. He is married with 10 children. Recently his medical center was firebombed by anti-abortion activists. Read more of his reports — Here.
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