Chaos in America: How Did We Get Here?

Dallas burned for the second straight night last week.

The downtown Neiman-Marcus windows were shattered, the store looted. In preparation to raising their tumult, some hoodlums had dropped pallets of bricks on the protest route the night before.

Attempting to protect his neighborhood by confronting the ruffian rage, a Dallas citizen was savagely beaten. Left for dead, he may never recover.

Whereas George Floyd’s tragic death and the sinfulness of racism are inexcusable from any point of view, they cannot and should not be used as an excuse for the massive, wanton and indiscriminate destruction and calculated anarchy that is currently taking place. And neither can the brutality and lawlessness be justified by the fact that America’s founding was established upon address of grievances and the right for public demonstrations.

In wondering where the support for revolution and terror in the streets of America is coming from, there is no question that the rioters have access to essential resources, including organization, know-how and funding … nationwide.

While we might assume that an independent news media and press would be eager to investigate who is inciting political and social turmoil in America, they, alas, seem to be complicit in wanting to remove at any price the 45th president of the United States on Nov. 3, 2020.

In our op-ed of March 2020, we wrote: “Up to now President Trump’s most compelling reason for reelection was a bustling economy, but that advantage, like the queen being captured in a chess match, has been removed from the table by the coronavirus pandemic. Trump’s reelection is no longer a given.”

In view of his diffuse course of action to offset the panic pandemic’s impact, immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci’s approach appears to be consistent with earlier political episodes such as Russian collusion, impeachment, and Ukraine.

“When a country is in revolt, it has many rulers, but only with a person who has understanding and knowledge will it last a long time,” it says in Proverbs 28:2 (GW).

Elaborating on King Solomon’s caution, Jewish Hebrew scholar Michael V. Fox writes: “The transgression of a land—widespread, systemic violations of law—brings on anarchy, both as its natural consequence and as its fitting punishment, and with anarchy comes an oppressive multiplicity of rulers and factions.” Dr. Fox adds a cautionary advice for President Trump: “The proverb warns rulers against allowing crime and oppression to infect the land, on pain of losing their own position.”

How did America get here?

The short answer is that secularism’s devoted priesthood imbued America’s youth with an ungodly set of beliefs through 100 years of public education, while the church remained idle and quiescent. The full extent of this iniquitous shift will come to light when we compare early American education textbooks and curricula, which concentrated on the development of virtue and character, with contemporary education’s focus on the exaltation and normalization of sin.

Let’s not forget that politics is downstream from culture, and that culture, in the words of Joseph Boot, is the public manifestation of religion.

Christians surrendered their biblical responsibility of rearing and educating their children to pagan secularists over the last century, which amounts to an inauspicious lack of observance to fulfill Genesis 18:19 (GW): “I have chosen him so that he will direct his children and his family after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just. In this way I, the Lord, will do what I have promised Abraham.”

There may be a silver lining to the COVID-19 upheaval.

A USA Today/Ipsos poll found that 60% of parents are “likely” to homeschool their children this fall, with 30% saying they are “very likely” to do so. A separate survey found that 50% of public schoolteachers may not return this fall.

If Christians would seize this opportunity to initiate a mass exodus from sexularized, heretical inculcation of America’s youth by government-run bureaucrats, the collapse of public education is quite a realistic outcome.

Returning to the question how America got here, an additional answer came last week in the form of a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Van Gordon Sauter. The former two-time president of CBS News, a forward-looking liberal married to former California Treasurer Kathleen Brown, the sister and daughter of former California governors Jerry Brown and Pat Brown, provided an indictment of “the ‘liberal leaning’ media” as having “passed its tipping point: A return to balance would be commercially unviable. The best solution may be an honest embrace of bias.”

Unfortunately, his accurate analysis didn’t provide a proposal how to correct or repair the situation, so we will offer one:

With his 30-year background in consulting, business and non-profit, Dr. Lance Wallnau puts the matter in perspective: “Listen, you guys who are Christians have an insider advantage on all of this chaos because there’s a system to how the world works.

“We wrestle not with flesh and blood but principalities and powers. That doesn’t mean that people aren’t involved; it means that there are devils and demons working through people, behind people and energizing systems. What Christians have never really understood, because we think that everything can be solved with a local church, a conversion, and the gospel being preached … well, it doesn’t work that way. Because at some point China was taken over by the Mao Revolution, and [they] killed all the Christians; same thing with Stalin.

“Now we’ve got enough churches, and enough Christian television and Christian books, TBN, DayStar … it’s not as though we don’t have enough talking, it’s just that we have very little impact. If you want to be very honest about it, the LGBTQ crowd, the race organizations, the ‘Borderless-America’ organizations, the anti-Israel organizations, they’ve done a better job of making disciples than Christians have, because we’re just kind of holding our own, and the other groups are converting.

“They’re institutional, they’re academia, they are in media, they are in Hollywood, they’re in government, in the courts, in law, and if we’re not careful they are going to be in church, taking over what you can say and when you can say it.”

In summary, Wallnau’s assessment comes down to Jesus’ kingdom assignment as found in Matthew 16:18, His ekklesia, involving societal transformation as the major thrust of the Great Commission to disciple nations.

Two distinct religions are vying for control of America’s public square: eternal and immutable Christianity versus transient and mutable secularism. What’s happening is spiritual—two distinct religions cannot coexist as one will ultimately end in the destruction of the other.

God be praised that Gideons and Rahabs are entering the public square in the form of elected officials to local office: city council, school board, parks and recreation and so on. This way, societal transformation will occur over the next 20 to 30 years as Christians begin to take their stand as Jesus’ ekklesia. {eoa}

David Lane is the founder of American Renewal Project.