Transcript

America's Providential History Podcast looks at America's decline

>> Stephen McDowell: Hello. Glad you're joining us for this edition of America's Providential History Podcast. During this past year, we have looked at how God was involved in the birth, growth and development of the United States. We looked at miracles that God did, the uniqueness of the American nation. We looked at how God, worked on behalf of the cause of American liberty to give birth to a new nation, an new nation birthed in Christian liberty. And we've examined, some of the great fruit that came forth after this nation was planted. We looked at how the seeds of the United States came out of the Bible. They were biblical truths and ideas. And those seeds were planted and produced great fruit, unlike has been seen in the world. And so when we learn of God's hand, we learn of the uniqueness of the founding of America. And people hear of this. They always ask me, well, how did we get to the place where we are today, God? We see the great fruit that came forth. And as we've examined the evidence, we see God was central in all aspects of the beginning of this nation. But today we have all kinds of difficulties and problems and bad fruit growing. We hear it every night on the news. And so how do we get to the place where we started, in Christian truth, with great fruit. But today we have such a mess and a decline. And so I want to begin to look today, as we begin this new year, first to look at America's decline. How has it come about that we have turned aside from the Christian faith and began to see weeds grow, within the, the, garden of this nation, if you will. So we'll look at the decline, and then we'll examine, well, and what to do about it? What can we do? How can we turn America around today and let it fulfill the vision that those founders of America had to be a city set upon a hill, a light to the, to the nations. So we explored how the seeds of liberty produced good fruit in the United States of America. After that planting of Christian liberty in America, God, of course, was working in other nations, especially after the birth of America, and with American missionaries and others began to plant seeds in other nations as well. And good fruit began to come forth in Christian nations are those nations that were rooted in Christian ideas. In Western Europe, in particular, the United States, good fruit began to come forth. And in the past 250 years, since we've been a nation, that liberty and fruit has grown and spread to many other nations. And so, good seeds began to come forth. But of course, secular seeds which had been part of really most nations of the world until recent, recent centuries. They've always been producing, bad fruit. But we also began to see when secular seeds, ungodly seeds were planted in the United States, they began to bear bad fruit as well. And so liberty was been advancing. You know, we've looked at in the past few podcasts how there's been no end to the increase of Christ's kingdom. And when Christ came into the world 2000 years ago, all things changed. Whole new era came to mankind. The gospel age, was launched. And that gospel has spread and grown and brought great change and transformation. America was just part of that, an important part because it was really the first nation built upon biblical truth, Christian self government and Christian, liberty. We see a gradual advancement of truth, a gradual coming forth of good fruit. it was especially launched in the United States. We've looked at some of those technological advancements that occurred, here and in other Western nations and developments of many inventions, discoveries like radio and automobiles and airplanes and television, computers, space flight, communications, as well. And those continued on not only during the 1800s, but as we move into the 20th century. In the 1900s, much good fruit began to come forth in so many different, in every area of life really. And economic advancements continued to. There were men that we've written about in our writings, like John Wanamaker, the founder of modern merchant business. I have a booklet that I wrote looking at Wanamaker's life. And in future podcasts we'll explore that and see what he did. We talked about George Washington Carver, how he applied the truth and transformed the economy of the South. As he was carrying out the mission that God called him to, he helped to elevate the farmer and men out of poverty. Is seeking to fulfill God's purposes for his life. And so the point is that especially in the 1800s, good fruit was coming forth. Of course, there were challenges to deal with. We talked about the challenge of slavery and how Christian ideas reflect that were in the foundation of our founding covenants of the Declaration and Constitution. They prevailed in ending slavery and America led the way in ending slavery in the world. So there are certainly challenges that we were facing while all this good fruit was coming forth. But while good seeds were being planted in the first century of America, that there also began to be bad seeds that began to be planted along with it. And with those bad seeds you have the, not the fruit of Christianity, but the fruit of secularism. Secularism or man Centered philosophies of life. That's what secularism is in essence rejects that there's any omnipotent God who is involved in his creation. But man will be his own savior. Man is the source of law, the source of what's right and wrong. Man must save himself. This is part of this ideology of secularism. And so with the good fruit, good seeds being planted in the 1800s and 1900s, also bad seeds began to be planted in it. And they gave rise to secularism and education and law and science and government and the economy and the church and arts, music and the media. And I don't really have time to explore this in detail, but we write more about this in our book, America's Providential History.

We've examined how education in America was rooted in the Bible

But you do begin to have a rise of secularism and education. We've examined in past podcast how education in America was rooted in the Bible. It was biblical, biblical in its, ah, philosophy, methodology and curriculum. In fact, we have a new film that has just come out, Educated for Liberty. You can see [email protected] that we talk somewhat about education in America, how it was biblical, but touch on the rise of secularism and education and the seed of that. Because early education, as we've said, was centered in the home, rooted in the Bible for a Christian reason, to teach people to how to acquire truth, to train godly ministers, train everyone to be able to read and understand truth. But a different seed began to be planted in 1830s and 40s. Horace Mann in Massachusetts was, impetus for starting state education. State controlled, state centered, state mandated. Later state compelled, education because he was copying what he had seen in Prussia and the schools there, state schools. And he thought, well, let's implement this there. So around 1840s, the late 30s and 40s, this is what began to occur. And over the next century, state after state began to adopt this model, contrary to the type of education that we'd had for centuries and contrary to what the Bible teaches about education as well. And so with the rise of secularism and education, state control compelled education. You gradually begin to have a removal of the Bible as the central text. As we've explored in past podcasts, the Bible was the reason that schools were started, to teach people how to understand and know the truth for themselves. And so gradually the Bible was still in the schools. Certainly Horace Mann didn't seek to take the Bible out of the school, but he, his philosophy, his ideology, along with others, led to the concept, well, the Bible is just one of Many texts it's not the central text but it's okay to learn about it for for a religious reason or a little bit of history. But it wasn't the central text. The infallible word of God, the source of all truth became just one of many texts. That seed began to gradually bear fruit and state education was instrumental in this. Then you have people like the Beards, Charles and Mary Beard who were secularist, statist, Marxist really in their ideology. They began to write many books and these books began to impact the thinking of educators which began to have a Marxist interpretation of economics and other ideas. And this began to influence the schools through influencing the teachers and led to a secularization of history and economics and other things. John Dewey who gave us the Dewey Decimal System, he was by no means a godly man with a biblical view of education that he actually wanted to secularize our education. And he went about systematically wanting to get rid of our, the Christian philosophy and replace it with a man centered philosophy. So he was instrumental in setting up teachers, colleges, teachers schools and to train teachers in his secular philosophy of life and then send them back to schools all over the nation for them to begin to sow their bad ideas. Colleges began to be secularized. All the early colleges were started buying for the Christian faith as we said before, 106 of the first 108 colleges and started buying for the Christian faith. In 1860. There's about 257 colleges in America. All but 17 of those were started by or for the Christian faith for a Christian reason. ministers were the presidents of almost all these colleges throughout most of the 19th century. But gradually they began to be secularized and changed began like in Harvard in the early 1800s. They began to embrace Unitarianism. Now initially Unitarianism is rooted in biblical worldview. But gradually that was reduced, was kicked out, replaced with more of a secular worldview. And Unitarianism would merge with universalism. And a lot of colleges embraced those ideas of false thoughts of who God was and how he works and then gradually led to just even rejecting any concept of God at all. And so colleges began to be secularized and state schools as I mentioned from the time of Horseman for the next century began to grow and grow. And after a while the state education became compulsory. You had to go to school and somewhere or another. When secularism took over the philosophy and methodology of what was taught then you had the vast number of American people being miseducated and they were given ideas contrary to biblical ideas, which affected how they thought and how they lived and affected all of society. So you have a gradual rise of secularism during the 18, going into the 1900s, and certainly has continued on today and even gotten much more radical. And, and what, what's being done in, in our, our schools while this is going on. And because of this, because education is like a seed and it deter the education determines what the future of a nation will be. It's how you transfer a way of life as we've explored in past, podcasts. So you begin to have a rise of secularism in law as well. Now, law in early America, everyone had a biblical view of law. That view is that, as William Blackstone said in his Commentaries of the Laws of England, any law that is contrary to God's higher law is no law at all. So this was the view of law, that law is absolute. It originates from the Creator. God has revealed what is truth, to us, in the Scriptures. And that's how most everyone understood law until we began to get into the late 1800s. And there began to replace this absolutes of God's law view with evolutionary law, that law changes as men change. And law does not emanate from the Creator of all things. Law is not absolute, but law is relative to a people in a society and that they can determine for themselves what is right and wrong. And this is reflected by Roscoe Pound, who was the president of Harvard Law school in the 1920s. Now, Roscoe Pound did not attack biblical law directly. In fact, he said, look, this view is good. That embracing a biblical view of law, that they're right and wrong and absolutes as reflected in the Ten Commandments. This has enabled us as a nation to progress and advance. And we've advanced more than any other people in history. But he said, this is not good enough to continue to take us into the future. If we want to continue to advance and get better, we've got to come up with another concept, another idea of law. So this was his suggestion. His suggestion, instead of embracing the absolutes of God's law, where he declares what's right and wrong, we now need to be the determiner of law itself. We man, or a group of men, or some select men, you know, judges or others like this, these are the one that will determine that. And that man will decide for himself what law is, what is right or wrong. And so his comment was in his book the Spirit of Common Law in this state in this condition, he said, the state takes the place of Jehovah. So he summarized well the whole problem that we have today with the law, where in the beginning of America we looked and said that God declares what's right and wrong. We need to find out what he says, live our life and base our society upon this truth, because to the extent that we do, it will go well with us and we will be blessed. But this began to be replaced gradually, and it started before Roscoe Pound with others in the late 1800s. But, he just expressed this idea that was growing among many involved in law and government and politics and things. He said, we're going to look, to man himself. So evolving law and the sovereignty of the state replaced the absolutes of God's law. And this certainly has produced all kinds of different problems. And we face that today. Now, this idea that man himself is the source of law, what's right or wrong, is not a new idea. In fact, this was the original sin of Adam and Eve when they disobeyed God. It says there in Genesis 3:15, that they were going to determine for themselves what was right and wrong when they ate of that tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Because what they were declaring is, says, lord, we don't like what you have chosen and consider to be good and evil. That we think we can do a better job, we'll decide for ourselves what is good and evil. And that, of course, brought great misery to Adam and Eve and all mankind, after him. So they're still seeking to do that today. Fallen man, man who rejects God, thinks that we will determine ourselves what is good and what is evil. And we see that idea began, to grow and grow in law schools in America, and hence, you know, law. All those who would become judges, they reflected, many of them more and more reflected this idea of evolving law, evolutionary law. And so activist judges who legislate are a great problem for us today. you know, the. The court, our courts and concept of law has gone through different eras. some have said that the original, at least on the national system, after we became a nation, 1789, and the very first few decades, 1800, 1835, has been a period where there was national supremacy. This is when we were working out the balance of power between the national government and the state's government. Governments, that federal concept of government. We've touched on that in past podcasts. We'll look at that in more detail in future podcasts.

With the establishment of the US Constitution, we were setting into place national supremacy

But there was, with the establishment of the US Constitution, we were setting into place the idea of national supremacy that the United States. There is overarching, you know, set of ideas and laws that all the states, when they came together, agreed to live under, though those powers are very limited and stated in the Constitution only where the national government is supreme. Then from like 1835 to 1895, we went through an era that's been called constitutional supremacy. So now we say, well, the Constitution supreme, it's not, you know, 51% of whoever the legislature was at the time, but, that anything that legislators on a national, state level did had to, not violate those constitutional principles, because the Constitution is the chief law of the land and that while it can be amended, it was a difficult process and that it couldn't be amended just by one vote. Over 50% couldn't change those general concepts of how our government functioned in the land. But then you began to move into a period, 1895 to 1950, of judicial supremacy. There's a group of judges, as they embrace this evolutionary view of law, says, well, you know, it's Constitution, is an old, ancient document. And, you know, and we can't look back at what the founders thought we're going to determine ourselves. You know, it's under that concept. People today have said, well, it's a living document. It can't be dead. It's alive, and we're the ones that are providing life to it, today. But as one chief justice said back in the 1930s, he said, the Constitution is whatever we say it is. Speaking of the judges, the Supreme Court. And that, idea began to spread among way too many people thinking that the courts will be the ultimate ones that decide what is constitutional or not. And that's bad. That was, bad in itself. But in Recent times, say 1950 to the present, it's gotten even worse where the courts have entered into this idea of judicial activism. not only they say, well, we're going to determine what's constitutional or not, but now they say, well, we're going to legislate from the bench because we don't like. There's things that we see that we think ought to be done, and we're not going to sit around and wait for the legislature to do it, so we'll just do it ourselves. And things like Roe v. Wade, when the court ruled that that, abortion was okay, you could kill the unborn child, this was obviously way beyond, the constitutional, provisions and violated the legislature, national legislature, and, the state legislators as well. When that was Passed. That's an example of judicial activism and there are many others, like ruling that same sex marriage is okay. That's continued on in more recent times as well. So those are errors of different periods of the court. And that has come about as the false ideology and philosophy has arisen that man will determine what's right or wrong. And then we also began to see a rise of secularism in science as well. in 1859 Charles Darwin wrote his book Origin of the Species and he began to posit this concept of evolution, that man was not created supernaturally by God, but he evolved. And everything we see in life today can be explained by evolution. we have in the 1925 in the scopes trial where actually the creation was upheld. But it was, the arguments were so shallow that people began to reject this idea of creationism and embrace more of, oh well, we evolved. Human beings are just a chance product of time that as one person put it, from gu to you by way to the zoo. That's what we've been teaching in our schools today. Interestingly enough though, we've been teaching this idea of evolution for the last few generations. The majority of people still don't believe in evolution, that they think no, it couldn't have happened, there must be a God. but so with the rise of this concept of evolution and teaching evolution in schools, there was correspondingly a squelching of any mention of intelligent design at all. That there's no toleration of alternate theories because evolution is just a theory, it's not science, it can't be proved. But, false ideologies, the only way that they can prevail is to suppress other ideas, suppress truth. That's John Milton back in the 1500s, wrote Areopagitica in which he said God is not afraid of falsehood being presented in the marketplace of ideas. As long as God isn't afraid of anything. But he doesn't mind that. If you're going to allow truth to be presented with it, because truth will prevail. As John Milton said, let truth and falsehood grapple, let them go and fight. And you examine the ideas that they present. And truth will prevail because falsehood is not logical. And if you uphold, ah, truth next to it, people will see that and will be swayed to the truth because truth is like light. And a little bit of darkness in a room full of light is unnoticeable. But a little bit of light in a room full of darkness is overwhelming. And that's how truth operates. not only the idea of secularism in science and evolutionary Darwinianism in science, but there's a corresponding squelching of any, anything mentioned contrary to that. So what we've been looking at and there's still more to examine which we will in our next podcast is that along with good seeds with good fruit during the 1800s and 1900s the weeds and seeds began to be planted. They started very small, unnoticeable by most. Like when Horace Mann suggested we need state controlled schools again you got to realize that they were still Christian, the Bible was taught and there's prayer and that there wasn't too much overtly that had changed. But you set a mechanism in place which has led to what we have today. Because the according to the Bible it's not the state's responsibility to educate. Parents have the right and responsibility to govern the education of their children. They are the ones that are primaries. State should not be involved in that directly at all. But so when this happened most people didn't say much about it because they thought, well, you know, they still externally doing about what they did before except there were a few, there were some ministers and others who spoke up, they could understand sowing and reaping and they looked forward into the future and saw this is going to lead to all the problems that we see today from the state compelled, state mandated, state supported education. And so this rise of secularism took place in education and law and in science. And in the next podcast we'll look at some other areas where there was the rise of secularism and government and the church and arts and media as well. And then we will begin to take a look at well, what do we do about it if this is the case? How do we turn America around? What is the remedy for this decline? So I hope you will join us next week as we continue to look at why the decline in America. But more encouragingly and more importantly, what do we do about it? Well I invite you to Visit our website providencefoundation.com get some of our books, especially America's Providential History and read that so you can look at more detail of some of these things that we are discussing. So hope to have you back next week. God bless you.