With dark shadows of uncertainty descending upon the hearts of so many at the conclusion of 2012, one can only hope 2013 will be a year of promise. But even in these dark days, miracles do still happen, especially when people are willing to roll up their sleeves for the cause of freedom.
This present darkness has its roots in our nation’s moral decline, and the further we get from our moral center, the worse off we are as a people -- and a nation. It has taken some time to get where we are today. Over the years, Conservatives have allowed Progressives to hijack the conversation about our founding principles. Liberals have replaced morality with moral relativism in an attempt to justify their own moral ineptitude. For example, a group recently sanitized the King James Bible from any reference to homosexuality, replacing it with their own politically correct version they titled the “New Queen James Bible.”
Moreover, we’ve allowed liberals to distort our founders’ intentions concerning the separation of church and state. Consequently, prayer and most other references to God have been banned from the public square; yet they see no plausible correlation to those actions and recent mass shootings.
Mum’s the word when it comes to God, but the roof is raised by right to choose discussions -- just as long as the conversation stays within the confines of the human life women should be allowed to extract from their bodies. But choice flies out the window when the discussion changes to things the rest of us put in our bodies -- like soda, fats, salt, and caffeine. They’re all about women’s rights – until you mention Islamic extremism or third-world barbarism in places like Darfur. And to them, capitalism is reprehensible, but taking hard-earned money from a capitalist is okay.
Progressives’ ideological inconsistencies will be their downfall and their ideology will most certainly crumble beneath the weight of truth just as the Iron Curtain did in 1989.
What is wrong in America today is what went terribly wrong in Russia many years ago when the Soviet Union tried the Marxist way to go it on its own without God. While many cast the blame for their problems on poor economic and political choices, Russian writer and Nobel Prize recipient Alex Solzhenitsyn blamed it on the fact “men had forgotten God.” He was right, and the world discovered how wrong Marx was when men (and women) who refused to forget God played a monumental role in crushing Communism in Eastern European countries.
The story is told in Philip Yancey’s book, “Finding God in Unexpected Places,” in East Germany every demonstration began with worship. (I’m not getting all spiritual on you here; I’m simply restating history.) Small groups would throw prayer meetings filled with political dissidents, concerned citizens, and some of those reprehensible Christians. After a period of prayer, pastors spoke while holding newspapers in one hand and Bibles in the other. Afterward participants went outside to walk peacefully through dark streets holding banners and candles.
In October 1989, as East Berlin was celebrating the 44th year of its communist regime, police were instructed to shoot demonstrators in Leipzig, where crowds had grown to nearly 500,000, but thankfully never did. On November 9, the crowd had doubled to one million when the unimaginable happened; a gap in the Berlin Wall opened. Without incident, candle-carrying East Germans peacefully filed through and over the wall, effectively bringing down the East German government in the process.
By years’ end, multiple Eastern Bloc countries joined East Germany’s fate, and by the end of 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved. Hope sprung eternal and the world experienced a long-anticipated fresh breath of freedom because people put their faith and longing for freedom into action thus allowing the world to witness a miracle.
Susan Stamper Brown is an opinion page columnist, motivational speaker and military advocate who writes about politics, the military, the economy and culture. Email Susan at writestamper@gmail.com or her website at susanstamperbrown.com.