Our nation has faced moral decay, and the erasure of Christianity has accelerated the process. We must pray.

From WORLD. Perhaps it’s my relative youth showing, or what C.S. Lewis referred to as “chronological snobbery,” but surveying the surrounding culture and observing the increasing polarity of our national debates, I often think to myself, “have things ever been so cataclysmically strange?” There is a general sentiment I hear expressed by people from all walks of life, some even much older than myself. I talk to so many who perceive the moral disarray and fragmentation of America with disbelief and shock.

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I don’t arrive at this perspective by comparing the supposedly halcyon days of the 1950s to 2022. No, I’m fine to compare this to a year as recent as even 2008, the year I graduated from college. …

What would have been revolutionary in 2008, like “gay marriage,” seems almost “traditional” to many Americans in 2022, by the sheer force of its cultural normalization in America. …

The surrealism of our simmering unrest is explainable, I think, in the near total collapse of Christianity as America’s underlying public ethic. … What I’m observing is the final stripping away over the last few years of the last thin layer of Christian veneer. No secularist will say this out loud, of course. …

Tragic as this is (and it is tragic), stripping away the dross does at least allow wildly divergent views on the world to surface in full force. Are you for lethal violence toward unborn human beings, or aren’t you? Unabashed honesty that comes from staring down the secular abyss will at least allow Americans to choose whose vision they think best comports with human flourishing.

Americans are growing more honest about the different moral universes they occupy. We should not be surprised when those universes come into conflict and test whether the democratic experiment can persist without a thick moral vision anchoring it. The debates that Christians are having about the durability of liberal democracy stem from the question of whether liberal democracy can persist as the moral worldview once supporting it—that is, Christianity—is denied. I do not believe that it can.

In fact, I want to be even clearer about that: America’s future must be grounded in transcendent truth or else cultural demise is a certainty. …

How are you praying for America? Share your prayers and scriptures below.

(Excerpt from WORLD. Photo Credit: Canva)