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“Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD; and the people whom He hath chosen for His own inheritance”

The currents of the oceans and rivers carry away loose objects caught in them. The common current maintains the direction. The only things that are not carried in the current are the things which are rooted or anchored. Plants, for instance, bend to the current, but they are not removed from their place unless they are uprooted.

When a nation of people has their Christian faith damaged, then their moral, social and political roots are exposed. They are swept from their anchorage. They drift with the prevailing current because they have no absolutes. Many see drifting as a healthy state, demonstrating progress, but others realize that uprooted plants are dying plants. They will begin to decompose shortly unless they are replanted. However, the replanting process is exceptionally tedious. Root shock may still bring death to the plant. The drift since 1865 has become a cascade.

There is a great danger for an unstable society that is adrift. It appears that death and decomposition are imminent; and that is the prospect, if there is no return and re-rooting. To return to the gardening analogy, the replanting of an uprooted plant needs a similar soil, moisture and sun. There is danger for the replanted object, just as there is danger in trying to return a nation to its original intentions in its original documents and the prevailing Christian faith of the era. For many there is the question, “What were the original intentions?” Why? We now have fabricated history that does not actually answer that question, but gives a politically correct re-invention. For example, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence was a minister of the gospel by the name of Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon. He is virtually unknown today because of maintaining the bogus interpretation of the separation of church and state.

These United States has had those seeking to uproot from her original purpose. The Anti-Federalists were aware of this, and their writings and speeches declared as much. Patrick Henry's speech against the proposed Constitution's preamble was an example. He declared that the document was a betrayal of the earlier Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation which maintained the rights of the States. The introduction of the Constitution revealed a change in the intent of government. It began “We the people...” and not “We the States...” which was a red flag to Mr. Henry and the others who gave opposition to the proposed constitution. Henry warned that this would lead to centralized government, inordinate taxation and an ultimate schism in the nation (the War Between the States).

The rise of Transcendentalism and other forms of anti-biblical beliefs and philosophy, in New England, were to bring unrest and an uprooting of the plant of liberty which had been nurtured in the new world. The great cost paid by Christian suffering and the sacrifice of the Fathers of the nation was thrown away to accommodate humanism. Thus the nation became man centered instead of law centered.

The prevailing current of a man-centered humanism, as opposed to God-centered Trinitarianism, began to sweep the Northeast, and now its vestiges are found everywhere. Transcendentalist William Ellery Channing expressed that view when he wrote, “In ourselves are the elements of divinity.” When man thinks he is god, he has rejected the God who alone can help in time of need. Providentially, the humanists were allowed to uproot the absolutes that had an anchorage in the culture for many generations. These were to be allowed to demonstrate that a utopian society cannot be produced by human effort in opposition to the eternal principles. This drift had received impetus from the importation of French infidelity and Eastern ideas. Thus the New Age movement gained its genesis in this land in New England.

The South resisted this drift and became a region even more despised than before. The antebellum period saw a purging of Southern institutions of any vestiges of skepticism. Skeptics, who thought it was their duty to punish the intransigence of the South, headed the Abolitionist movement in the North. The South resisted the enthronement of man in God's place, and the supposed salvation which it was to bring. The rallying point that those abolitionist radicals finally hit upon was the slavery issue. The sacrifice of the South to bring atonement was the result. The South had already begun to work toward an end of slavery because it was not economically feasible, although it was constitutionally allowable. The South had outlawed the importation of slaves. This meant that the New England slave merchants were out of business. The burden of the South was how to end slavery without subjecting four million slaves to a world where they would have a difficulty surviving. Also, the North was unwilling to return any of the lucrative profits from their importation of slaves (to help with the necessities of slaves once they were freed). Many of these were slaves and their descendents that New England ship owners had been selling in the South for over a hundred years.

The Second War of Independence was fought over the same issues as the First War of Independence. The only difference was the South was not now fighting King George III. Rev. Dr. William Meade of Virginia, who had such a great impact as R. E. Lee’s minister, said, “that if our ancestors had good reason for taking up arms in 1775, surely we had much better, for the oppression they suffered from the mother-country was not a tithe of the provocation we have received from the government at Washington.” The enemy now was the skeptics of New England who had poisoned the thinking of numbers of Northern people. They also had gained the ear of government in the North.

Providentially, the South lost that military war, although the truth for which they stood is eternal. However, the South still tried to hang on to her God-centered culture. Deconstructionists sought to alter this resistance to change by importing their humanistic brand of social salvation into the South. They took control of the educational institutions and other institutions. This final reduction was to press the entire nation into the grand experiment of the worship of man with their eventual enslavement. Now citizens had rights their government would not sustain. The result has been disastrous. There has been an enthroning of sodomy as a preferred lifestyle; there is the wanton disregard for private property; there is abortion as the final solution to unwanted children; and there is a host of other deviations from constitutional government and moral uprightness. Pragmatism is now the American way. The rule of law has been replaced by the rule of social convenience.

The two political parties are adrift. Both are drifting on the same prevailing social current, with the exception that one is just further down the river than the other. There are no absolutes in the new way of thinking, so the current mood of the country, as discerned by the social engineers, is to foment policy. Now it is “what the people want” that is the rule, but the people are never really consulted! What is right or wrong is considered relative. The true Christian faith is seen as a handicap to society. It is tolerated by some, but opposed by others who want its removal, so the grand experiment will be unopposed.

What are the results of this drift? The rule of God and law has been rejected for the rule of man and consensus. The belief in absolutes has been replaced with relativism. The presupposition of the ontological God has been removed for the supposition of the autonomy of man. The result that is supposed to follow is autosoterism or self-salvation. But God said, “Verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.” There is only one way of salvation, and Jesus said, “I am the way.” “Neither is there salvation in any other (but Jesus Christ): for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.”

The result of this drift can only end in ruin like the Roman Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the Egyptian Empire, etc. Is there any hope? Yes! The hope is in same place where it has always been. The Psalmist said, “Hope thou in God.” Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me.” There must be a re-rooting of the nation, but it is a task that cannot be accomplished by man apart from repentance of sin. Man is the problem and not the solution, as the founders also observed. Paul, the apostle, spoke of being “rooted and built up in Christ, and stablished in the faith.” Why was it necessary to be “rooted?” “Lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.” Remember, “Political Washington cannot save, because it has been involved in cutting the ship of state from her moorings and setting her adrift!” Political Washington is the problem! A return to the God of the Bible, through His Son Jesus Christ, is the answer!