In his recent opinion piece titled A Culture in Collapse, Victor Davis Hanson wrote: “In the last six months, we have borne witness to many iconic moments evidencing the collapse of American culture.
“The signs are everywhere and cover the gamut of politics, the economy, education, social life, popular culture, foreign policy, and the military. These symptoms of decay share common themes.
“Our descent is self-induced; it is not a symptom of a foreign attack or subterfuge. Our erosion is not the result of poverty and want, but of leisure and excess. We are not suffering from existential crises of famine, plague, or the collapse of our grid and fuel sources. Prior, far poorer, and war-torn generations now seem far better off than what we are becoming
“What is happening to us is not due to an adherence to a too strict conservative tradition but is almost exclusively the wage of the progressive project.
“In sum, American civilization has been turned upside down, and we have a rendezvous soon with the once unthinkable and unimaginable.”1
As to the term “unthinkable,” the current malfeasance and mismanagement by the Biden administration is the culprit threatening to wipe out the Democrat bench up-and-down-the-ticket for a whole generation on Election Day, November 5, 2024. Listen closely and you can hear Democrat consultants David Axelrod [a former Obama strategist] and James Carville [a former Clinton campaign strategist] near hyperventilation as they raise the alarm.
Here’s why: a Suffolk University/USA Today poll from December 29 found that President Biden drew only 63% from black voters, that is, down from the 87% he received in 2020. That same poll found the president trailing Donald Trump by 34% to 39% among Hispanic voters who broke for Biden in 2020 by 65% to 32%. Karl Rove writes in the Wall Street Journal, “Among voters under 35, Mr. Trump leads 37% to Mr. Biden’s 33%. In 2020 Mr. Biden carried voters 18 to 29 by 60% to Mr. Trump’s 36% and 30- to 44-year-olds by 52% to 46%.”2
Compound current Democrat ineptness with the diabolical mix of Hamas’ grisly October 7 attack on Israel, multiply with fever-pitched pro-Hamas/antisemitic demonstrations across America’s elite university campuses and Ivy League schools, incorporate the anti-Israel protests last Monday in Lower Manhattan under the banner of ‘Shut it Down for Palestine’ as pro-Palestinians blocked traffic in rush hour to people on the way to work and … voilà, there you have it.3 Another leg of the Democratic stool is about to crumble.
Pew Research reported in 2020 that Jews are among the most consistently liberal and Democratic groups in the U.S. population. Seven in ten Jewish adults identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party. Half described their political views as liberal.4
Orthodox Jews on the other hand, who worship the God of Heaven and Earth and know Scripture, are virtually the reverse of Jews as a whole. 60% of Orthodox Jews describe their political views as conservative, 75% identify as Republicans or lean toward the GOP, and 81% approved of Trump’s job performance at the time of the survey.
In his An Exposition of Hebrews, A.W. Pink writes: “Now there are two properties to a ‘foundation’, namely, it is that which is first laid in a building; it is that which bears up the whole superstructure. To which we may add, it is generally lost to sight when the ground floor has been put in. Such was the relation that Judaism sustained to Christianity. As the ‘foundation’ precedes the building, so had Judaism Christianity.
“The truth of Christianity rests upon the promises and prophecies of the Old Testament, of which the New Testament revelation records the fulfillment. As the ‘foundation’ is lost to sight when the building is erected on it, so the types and shadows of the earlier revelation are superseded by the substance and reality.”
Old Testament scholar John H. Walton writes in his award-winning commentary The NIV Application Commentary Genesis that the phrases spirit of God and spirit of the Lord in the Old Testament result in a fairly clear profile of the revelation given to the Israelites and their resulting understanding. They understood the spirit of the Lord not as a separate entity, but as an extension of Yahweh’s power and authority. “In this sense, it was understood as something like the ‘hand of the Lord’. The spirit of the Lord empowers but does not indwell, gives authority but does not regenerate.”
Marcello Pera [born 1943], the former President of the Italian Senate and author of books on science and philosophy points to American Christendom in his Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians: The Religious Roots of Free Societies:
“The intellectual and political elites of the West take for granted that religion, in particular Christianity, is a cultural vestige, a primitive form of knowledge, a consolation for the weak-minded, and an obstacle to peaceful coexistence. We are told that politics must take a neutral stance on religious values and that societies must hold together without any reference to religious bonds. Liberalism is considered to be ‘free-standing’, and the Western, liberal, open society is taken to be ‘self-sufficient’.”
Marcello Pera reveals that not only is the relentless suppression of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and Biblical-based culture wrong, “it is also dangerous. The very ideas on which liberal societies are based and by which they can be justified – the dignity of the human person, the moral priority of the individual, the view that man is a ‘crooked timber’ inclined to prevarication, the limited confidence in the power of the state to render him virtuous – are distinctly Christian or, more precisely, Judeo-Christian ideas. Take them away and the open society will collapse.
“Anti-Christian secularism jeopardizes the identity of the West, leaving it with no conscience. The Founding Fathers of America, as well as major European intellectual figures such as Locke, Kant, and Tocqueville, knew how much our civilization depends on Christianity. The challenges of our particular historical moment, wrote Pope Benedict XVI, can be faced only if we stress the historical and conceptual link between Christianity and a free society.”5
Blessedly, for our children and theirs, Gideons and Rahabs are beginning to stand and enter the public square of America. To God be the glory.
David Lane
American Renewal Project
1. victorhanson.com/americas-culture-in-collapse/
2. www.wsj.com/articles/can-even-trump-save-bidens-2024-run-black-hispanic-young-voters-flee-democrat-7d01ccaa#comments_sector
3. www.reuters.com/world/pro-palestinian-protesters-block-new-york-city-bridges-tunnel-2024-01-08/
4. www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/05/11/u-s-jews-political-views/
5. www.amazon.com/Why-Should-Call-Ourselves-Christians/dp/1594035644Q
