How Attacks on Faith, Family, and Conscience Threaten All Our Freedoms

From Daily Signal.com (Aug. 6, 2020):

During these tumultuous times, as practically every American institution comes under attack from the far left and its allies, two of our most essential values seem to be especially targeted in an effort to “transform America.”

Those values are faith and family, the two essential pillars that serve as true stabilizing factors in any society.

The attacks on faith and family seem to be relentless.

In Nevada, amid the COVID-19 crisis, casinos are open, but churches are told they must remain closed. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom told churches that their congregants no longer could sing worship songs, even though they are wearing protective masks while doing so. In Portland, Oregon, radicals not only are burning the flag but Bibles as well. And tragically, in the same vein, vandals are targeting churches.

So, how did we get to this point? It didn’t happen overnight.

It is not a coincidence that our current cultural condition, and the turn to hard-left progressivism, began in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, as these values started to erode and lose influence in American society.

Those on the far left actively were launching attacks—sometimes stealthily—through seizing all the major corridors of cultural and political influence.

When these pillars of faith and family—both of which are key components of the Judeo-Christian principles upon which our nation was founded—started to come under attack, all other principles such as fiscal restraint, freedom of conscience, and limited government came under assault as well.

Regarding the family, several factors led our nation down the progressive path and away from conservatism. The social engineering of President Lyndon Johnson’s liberal Great Society of the mid-1960s devastated the family, as fathers no longer had to accept fiscal responsibility for the children they bore.

Legalized abortion greatly devalued human life and further enabled personal irresponsibility and selfish, rather than selfless, behavior. No-fault divorce made it easy for either spouse to walk away from the commitment of “until death do us part,” leaving a trail of broken children behind.

And attacks on the fundamental beliefs of the faithful created a culture where those beliefs not only were mocked but increasingly criminalized. One example: the persecution of those who do not wish to use their skills to participate in facilitating abortions.

On the faith front, many mainline denominations swapped out the Gospel for social justice and the abandonment of absolute truth. This left a spiritual vacuum for progressive thought—which sought governmental, rather than faith-based, solutions—to fill. Lost were the virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance—all of which are needed for society to thrive.

Thus, once the pillars of faith and the family were weakened, the rest of the house started to collapse, just as Abraham Lincoln warned the nation in 1858 that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

With the gap that was left by the removal of these two pillars of faith and family, progressives were able to introduce policies that destabilized rather than stabilized society. One such policy: encouraging single parenting, which has led to the tragic loss of fathers—an essential individual in every child’s life—in ever-increasing numbers.

Progressives attacked religious freedom and the role churches play in creating a “safety net” that government never could—by feeding both the body and the soul. [read more]