“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Dr. Martin Luther King
If you want to know the real cause of spiritual death America, here it is. It's not because there are too many abortions. It's not because "they" are trying to take away your guns. It's not because there are too many teen pregnancies, or because of the collapse of the family. It's not because the rest of the world doesn't follow your narrow interpretation of various Pauline scriptures, nor is it because the country is full of people who refuse to support a Republican for President.
The problem is deeper than that. the problem lies in a society full of so called Christians who have quit following Christ. Individuals who will agonize for decades over one or two scriptures written by Paul to specific churches over specific circumstances, but completely ignore the entire body of what Christ said. It lies in the system that glorifies mammon in every form imaginable, yet refuses to heed the overwhelming power of Christ's statements against violence and revenge. It lies in a "Christian" mentality that refuses to heed the call to help the poor and needy, in favor of narrowing the definition of "neighbor" to mean simply those that are like us and of whom we approve. And it lies in the system of thought that continuously blames the victims of our beliefs and practices as being the cause of the downfall of those same beliefs and practices.
You see, there would not be so many abortions if the politicians who claim to hate them supported women's rights to easily available birth control, supported a rational, fact based, sustainable plan to end poverty, and supported the lives of the same children they claim to defend after they came out of the womb. The need, and I mean the deep internal psychological need, to hold on to a gun at the expense of all else would not exist if we were not so dead set upon the idea of violence, revenge, and "othering" that Christ so despised. And the American family would not be collapsing if we had not allowed our entire social structure to be destroyed in favor of money, power, and hatred towards those not like us.
Unfortunately for the so called Christian right in this country, they will continue to lose support as long as they pretend to agonize over unformed blastocysts, while blowing off the deaths of tens of thousands of foreign children as the collateral damage of heathens. They will continue to fail as a political, social, and religious movement as long as they continue to ignore the words of their founder in order to favor the words of those who offer sacrifices of blood to mammon and other principalities and powers of this world. They will become increasingly embattled as they hold tight to violence as the solution to problems to which Christ suggested a solution of love, nonviolence, prayer, and humility. And eventually the world will watch as they turn into the power hungry, nation-state worshipping, money grasping things that they were meant to be the antithesis too, and quietly slip into the darkness of history.
In the end, the spiritual death that is befalling us in this country is the direct result of the seduction and co-option of those who should speak truth to power by the powers themselves. Love has been replaced by hate, compassion and peace by violence, and a principled stand against mammon by the worship of this deity itself. Thankfully, this death is matched by the beginnings of a spiritual revival which has yet to be recognized by mainstream Western Christianity. A strong, Christ centered, community based, oligarchy resisting Religious consciousness is arising in our young and in our downtrodden. Like every revival before it, it will be resisted, and its leaders will be declared heretics. That, fortunately, will be entirely unable to destroy the spirit of what is now and what is to come. In the end, "greater is He that is in us, then He that is in the world."
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