Deadly Storm Clouds Rising

While America Sleeps

It has been 248 years since the American Colonies declared their independence from Great Britain. Through the awesome Providence of God’s favor, He raised us up from insignificance and brought us through many hardships, dangers, and struggles to become the most powerful, most prosperous, and most freedom-blessed nation in the world. We have spent our tears and blood in this continuous struggle, but it was the Lord of Hosts who guided us and planted and nurtured our determination to persevere. We have raised mighty armies and mighty industries, and achieved spectacular technological advances, but it was always though His kind Providences that we succeeded in our building and in our victories. It has always been His invisible but invincible Arm that has defended us and brought confusion and defeat upon our enemies.

Will a nation that turns its back upon its God-given blessings and protection from its enemies do so without consequences? Will a nation that turns its back upon God’s Word and teachings continue to prosper? Will a nation that openly defies God’s standards long enjoy peace and security?  In his 1978  Commencement address at Harvard University, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn summed up how the Russian people had fallen into what turned out to be over 70 years of oppression, suffering, and brutality under Soviet Communism, in which some 60 million people were “swallowed up:”

"Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."

Scripture and history are filled with examples of leaders and peoples whose spiritual and moral decline resulted in foolish and self-destructive decisions. Pride goes before a fall (Proverbs 16:18) , and there is no more dangerous pride than “forgetting God” by pushing him out of our schools, our governments, our courts, our lives, our thinking, our hearts, and our decisions.

So what are the elements of the deadly storms that could destroy America? As the above paragraphs suggest, the underlying cause of all of them is the spiritual and moral decline that our country has experienced since about 1965. We have battled spiritual and moral decline before, but the recent decline seems astonishingly steep. Most recently, we seem to be in a spiritual and moral tail-spin.

I would divide the major elements of America’s extraordinary nation-destroying danger into three parts. The first part is an underlying set of false principles that make the nation extremely vulnerable to the potential death blow of the other two. The last two are not distant and speculative. They are near, real, and powerful.  They could run out of control within months, changing America so fundamentally as to render freedom, prosperity, justice, national security, public safety, and effective government beyond recovery—apart from Divine intervention.

The first of these has been with us and progressing for a long time. It is “Liberalism.” By this I mean “secular humanism.” Conservative Presbyterian Gresham Machen once wrote that liberalism and Christianity are two different religions. He was speaking of theological liberalism, but theological liberalism has come to have a strong influence on modern political liberalism. Its underlying problem is that it defines truth apart from God. It replaces God’s Scriptural truth with the latest fashion in humanistic thinking. Defining God according to the wishes and conveniences of men, liberalism defines truth and goodness in terms of human-invented idealism rather than reality. This conflict between self-deceived invented idealism and reality often defines the difference between liberal and conservative political positions. In Western culture, political conservatism also has strong theistic leanings, while political liberalism prefers humanistic orientations. Political liberalism’s great danger is that it allows idealism unwarranted by facts and experience to trump reality, often with disastrous results. That is why liberalism does not work. It also spawns dangerous derivatives like multiculturalism, political correctness, unexamined pluralism, egalitarianism, and unjust government schemes for distributing wealth and opportunity. Critical Race Theory and counterfactual gender ideology are two of the latest destructive fashions. The pervasive march of unexamined multiculturalism makes it particularly hard to avert serious national security problems.

“The single step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.”—Solzhenitsyn

The second and potentially fatal element of the perfect trilogy of storms is that the U.S. has the most foolish and corrupt de facto immigration system in the world. I have been writing about immigration for over 20-years. It was thoroughly corrupt in 2000,  displacing  millions of American workers and suppressing their wages by flooding the country with cheap foreign labor—much of it illegal.  Its most destructive feature is non-enforcement of immigration laws, largely for political reasons. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), illegal immigration will cost American taxpayers over $182 billion in 2023. This is based on 15.5 million illegal immigrants in the country. This is probably a very low estimate.  At least 15 percent of the population is now foreign-born. In 2022 alone, the Border Patrol estimated 3.0 million new illegal immigrants crossed our borders. The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that our present level of immigration may suppress the annual wages of American workers by about 5 percent per year. Moreover, many Americans are pushed out of the workforce and resort to welfare. All this is driven by mindless liberalism and desire for totalitarian power on the left and ruthless greed for endless supplies of cheaper and cheaper labor to profit special interest donors with few patriotic scruples.  

Yet too many in Congress are unwilling to recognize our extreme jeopardy. They have made immigration a sacred cow, and the sacred cow is now threatening our freedoms, culture and survival. Most recently, with many states mailing out ballots, the integrity of our election system is extremely vulnerable to vote fraud. Little is being done to keep non-citizens and even illegal immigrants from voting. Our election system is on the brink of complete corruption, which will have its consequences in public order, national security, freedom, and prosperity.

The third grave and immediate danger to America is resurgent Islam. Islam is defined by the teachings of Muhammad in the Quran, and his collected sayings (the Hadith) and records of his actions and biography (the Sira).  These three are the sacred scriptural foundations of Islam. From these come Sharia Law, which is the supreme law for all Muslims. These foundations plus 1400 years of history, including especially recent history, clearly indicate that  Islam is not a religion of peace and tolerance that has been hijacked by radicals. The violence, beheadings, and  threats of Holy War against all non-Muslims come directly from the Quran and Muhammad.     

There is no true Islam without these teachings. So-called “moderate” Muslims, which are common in some countries,  are generally secularized or purely cultural Muslims. The totalitarian nature of Islam, however, often silences moderate dissenters.  Genuinely moderate Muslims are often persecuted or killed as heretics for rejecting the sacred standards of Islam. According to Sharia Law, Ridda (apostasy, or leaving Islam) is the ugliest and worst kind of unbelief. According to chapter and section o8.1 of a classic manual of Islamic Sacred Law, Reliance of the Traveller: “When a person who has reached puberty and is sane voluntarily apostatizes from Islam, he deserves to be killed.”  

According to George Horton, who was U.S. Consul in Smyrna (now Izmir), Turkey, from 1911 to 1917,  the efforts of the Methodist Mission Board’s well-funded missionary institutions, schools, colleges, and hospitals in Turkey were extremely futile. Smyrna is one of the seven churches in “Asia” mentioned in Revelation 1:11. Turkish law prohibited the teaching or preaching of Christianity. Horton knew of only one convert, and he was promptly murdered by the Turks. Horton’s scholarly 106-page book, published in 1926, The Blight of Asia, tells of the systematic extermination of Christian populations in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire.  

Nevertheless, I estimate that between 15 to 25 percent of Muslims, depending on the national or ethnic group, would leave Islam, if they found it safe for themselves and their families to do so.

Thousands of Muslim immigrants are flooding into our country, but misguided multi-culturalism has reduced common sense vetting to zero. This stacks the risks against our cultural   survival. We are in grave danger of widespread infiltration, political subversion, and Jihadic violence. Caving to multiculturalism and political correctness could cost thousands of lives, economic hardship, and political disorder. We saw it here on 9-11, and we have seen it in Israel on October 7. Continuing to ignore the well-documented nature of Islam is similar to ignoring iceberg warnings on the North Atlantic. The “indestructible” RMS Titanic ignored six iceberg warnings on April 12, 1915. It only took it a few hours to sink, when it scrapped by one. We need to base our immigration and foreign policy decisions on facts not counterfactual humanist ideology. We currently ignore facts and warnings that do not fit our secular humanist ideology. But secular humanist ideology is often far removed from reality.

In Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard address, he covered many faults of the Soviet Union, but he reminded his audience that there were many of the same signs and many peculiarly American signs that American society was forgetting God. He believed America was showing many signs of spiritual weakness and noted a decline of courage and manliness in American society. He also believed Americans were becoming mired in vulgar materialism and had an over-inflated opinion of their own righteousness and culture and unfortunately judged other cultures including Russian culture by American self-approved standards. He thought and said that American popular music was intolerable.

In the same speech, Solzhenitsyn criticized the United States government and society for betraying 30 million people in Southeast Asia to suffering and genocide, when they “too hastily” abandoned Vietnam and Cambodia to the Communists in 1975. Indeed, our abandonment of South Vietnam in 1975 resulted in the deaths of 3.5 million South Vietnamese and Cambodians, as I have documented in my book, Lessons from the Vietnam War.  

Solzhenitsyn exemplifies a character trait frequently attributed to Russians. Russians tend to be direct, surprisingly direct to most Americans.  But a strong dose of directness is exactly what Americans need to survive the deadly moral storms that could destroy us.

“Whoever covers his sins will not prosper, but he who confesses them and forsakes them will obtain mercy.”—Proverbs 28:3