Dear Friends,
Having just witnessed the third assassination attempt on President Trump in less than two years, many are admitting that our society has entered a critical time where something has to change, but there isn’t a consensus about what the real problem is.
Fingers are pointing in every direction, except at those responsible and their failed policies. The typical solutions of more gun control and greater security have been put forth. But they’ve been working on those remedies for decades, and things are only getting worse.
The problem is much deeper than these outward things. Something systemic has taken place in our society.
A Gallup poll reveals that 30% of people aged 18–29 regard political violence as acceptable. Among 30–44-year-olds, 21% believe violence is acceptable. The 45–59-year-olds have 13% who promote political violence. The older generation (60+) has only 4% who accept violence toward those they disagree with.
That’s about 21% of 18–59-year-olds who accept political violence, while only 4% of those who are over 60 believe political violence is acceptable. That shows a huge societal shift in our nation that goes way beyond the attempted assassinations of President Trump.
Remember the assassination of Charlie Kirk last year, as well as the killing of one National Guard soldier and the wounding of another in Washington, DC, last year? What about Luigi Mangione, who executed Brian Thompson in December 2024? He became an instant cult hero to over 50% of people under 30 who view him favorably. Add to that the numerous killings of police officers and the open disrespect for officers trying to enforce our immigration laws, and the problem goes way beyond just guns and more security.
There has been a major shift in the thinking of our nation that has unleashed this evil upon our society, and we must figure out what that is and deal with it quickly.
Our Founding Fathers knew what the root of the problem was. John Adams, our second president, said on October 11, 1798,
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
U.S. Speaker of the House Robert Winthrop stated on May 28, 1849: “Men, in a word, must be controlled either by a power within them, or a power without them; either by the Word of God, or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible or by the bayonet.”
More recently, on February 8, 2011, Harvard Professor Clay Christensen, the Robert & Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, observed:
Some time ago, I had a conversation with a Marxist economist from China. He was coming to the end of a Fulbright Fellowship here in Boston, and I asked him if he had learned anything that was surprising or unexpected. And without any hesitation, he said, “Yes, I had no idea how critical religion is to the functioning of democracy.”
“The reason why democracy works,” he said, “is not because the government was designed to oversee what everybody does. But rather democracy works because most people, most of the time, voluntarily choose to obey the law. And in your past, most Americans attended a church or synagogue every week. And they were taught there by people who they respected.”
“My friend went on to say that Americans followed these rules because they had come to believe that they weren’t just accountable to society; they were accountable to God.”
Professor Christensen continued: “My Chinese friend heightened a vague but nagging concern I harbored inside that as religion loses its influence over the lives of Americans, what will happen to our democracy? . . . Where are the institutions that are going to teach the next generation of Americans that they, too, need to voluntarily choose to obey the laws? Because if you take away religion, you cannot hire enough police.”
I totally agree that a knowledge of the truth as presented in God’s Holy Bible will restrain sin, and that without it, the sinful nature of man is unbridled.
Sinful man has a propensity for sin. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”
It’s not guns that kill people any more than forks make people fat. It’s what’s in the hearts of people that causes the evil we see today, and that evil could not manifest if the truths of the Bible were more universally accepted.
The battle for truth has been lost to a large degree today because of a rejection of the Bible’s truth and authority by our leaders. Our ungodly leaders are more responsible for the violence we see today than they realize. They have systematically been fighting against every moral value that has acted as a restraint upon the depraved nature of man. They’ve taken the Bible and prayer out of our schools and replaced them with drag queens and pornography. They’ve forced legislation upon us that has caused an entire generation to grow up without absolute truth. They have made truth whatever our government says it is. That is completely contrary to our Declaration of Independence, which cites that our rights come from the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.
The answer to this is a return to God’s Word and the truths it presents.
The reason Satan’s lies have gained such a stronghold in the minds of so many people is because of the removal of God’s truth, i.e., the Bible. In the vacuum caused by an ignorance of God’s biblical truth, lies have proliferated. There was a time in the history of America that even those who didn’t embrace Christianity embraced many of the truths of Christianity, and that held evil in check to a large degree.
Not very long ago, non-Christians believed there was a God and a devil, a heaven to gain and a hell to avoid. That restrained evil because people believed they would someday have to give an account for their actions before a holy and just God.
That’s exactly the point being made in Proverbs 16:6, which says, “By the fear of the Lord men depart from evil.” If there is no fear, there’s no departing from evil. The depraved nature of man is set free to do whatever it wants.
David said in Psalm 36:1,
The transgression of the wicked saith within my heart, that there is no fear of God before his eyes.
Biblical truths have been eroded. We see people committing mass shootings and then committing suicide, thinking they will avoid any punishment. That’s a lie. They just procured for themselves an eternity in hell.
A case in point is the 1999 Columbine School shootings in Littleton, Colorado. Two teenage boys killed one teacher and twelve students before killing themselves. The usual rush to ban all guns came in the wake of that tragedy, but one older man revealed in an editorial how, when he was a kid, everyone in his small country school carried guns, and yet no one was ever shot.
Certainly, there are many fronts we need to attack this problem on, but we must deal with the root of the problem and not just the actions that spring from that corrupt root. A return to God and the moral truths presented in the Bible are the great restraining force missing in our nation today.
However, there is hope. Bible sales have increased 22% in the last two years. Church attendance is rising for the first time in decades, and the largest group returning to church are young men. These are very positive signs, but there is a long way to go.
Our governmental leaders need to take a stand for biblical morality and undo the damage they have done to the youth of our nation. Every time they promote ungodliness, they are removing the restraints that have served our nation well for 250 years.
This nation is in desperate need of another great awakening that will not only turn individuals back to God but return this nation to the founding principles that have made it the greatest nation in the history of the world. I believe this Third Great Awakening has already begun.
It is easy to get overwhelmed by the national problems and feel helpless to affect things on a national level. But if each of us would stand for truth in our own area of influence, we could make a difference. If enough of us do that, the Lord can weave those things together to affect the whole nation. I pray you join me in standing for the biblical truths that are the only solution to the root cause of all the evil trying to take over this nation.
