Let’s start with the basics:

Secular: denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis. Contrasted with Sacred.

Sacred: connected with God; regarded with respect and reverence.

Surely, I can’t be the only one. I can’t be the only one who sees the erosion of that which has been foundational to civil, tolerant, and law-abiding society, and feels a sense of loss and fears where our culture is headed.

As it turns out, I am not. I have read a handful of commentaries over the past several days that have expressed the same concerns, like these:

• Evil is real, and we're seeing more than usual from our own government
• Americans will defeat our domestic enemies by remembering David and Goliath
• For The West To Revive, Christians Must Toughen Up

We have grown either too comfortable, too accommodating, or too cowardly to call it what it is: Evil. The results can be seen in nearly everything that is taking place around us today.

For at least the past one hundred years (some say longer), the Leftist and Liberal-Progressive movements have strived to deny all that is sacred: The existence of a Divine being and His covenant relationship with His creation. Their quest has been to remove from the public square the mere mention of God in prayer or worship, along with any religious symbols or celebrations. The result has been an increase of the non-sacred—the secular—with its diminishing universal core values, guiding principles, support, hope, and love.

Leftists and Liberal-Progressives insist that “religion” has no place in government or public policy. Yet all that we hold sacred emanates from the universal human quest to find meaning, establish order, and objectively define that which is good and right. These ideals then form the guiding principles necessary for the just exercise of power entrusted to government in a covenant relationship with the governed. The timeless principles fostered by these foundational ethics are inherent in free and prosperous cultures. They foster the knowledge and assertion that there is eternal objective truth, as well as objective right and wrong. A society in which nothing is sacred will no longer be guided by objective truths, and what will remain will not be freedom and liberty, but “my truth” and the license to act as one pleases.

Our secular culture has given our government more power to oversee every facet of our lives, deciding right and wrong according to their quest for power and not eternal, transcendent values. Their efforts routinely fail because they seek man-made solutions to what are often spiritual problems.

We cannot count on those who made the mess to be the same people who will clean it up. Their denials, double standards, hypocrisy, and betrayals render them unfit for the job.

We observe their ideologies and their intolerance for “organized religion” or any beliefs contrary to their state-driven narrative, but they demand an unquestioning faith and allegiance to their own. Our faith in that which is sacred must be supplanted by their faith in that which is man-made, so that one may project upon it whatever one desires it to be to meet their needs.

Human history is filled with relentless tyranny and oppression, along with the oft-repeated confirmation that those in power will do anything to keep their power and to gain more. Theirs is a pursuit without conscience and, in their secular worldview, there is circular reasoning and rejection of immutable and eternal values, virtues, and truths. This has increasingly been to our society’s detriment, and we are reaping what has been sown.

Objectively examine any of these issues: policing communities, healthcare, environment/climate change, or taxation and we can clearly see their goals are not for our good. They exchange objective truth for a lie because their goal (which they cannot be honest about and must hide) is more government power and control.

We are now at least three generations into a government-envisioned Great Society that has not been achieved. Instead, it has perpetuated poverty and deepened our citizens’ dependence upon government.

The medical establishment insists that every person, regardless of risk, get a highly suspect “vaccine” or not be allowed to work and provide for his or her family. Becoming ill with the SARS-CoV-2 virus has less than a one-half of one percent fatality rate in people under 60, which would have been further reduced had there been access to safe, effective, and inexpensive medicines that have long-standing FDA approval. This has created a culture of fear, hopelessness, and needless death.

Throughout history, the two-parent nuclear family has been viewed as the cornerstone of a healthy society. However, the contemporary state-sponsored vision rejects the two-parent household. Yet when the social justice gatekeepers attribute “privilege” to an individual, one of the more common questions is whether they grew up in a household with two parents. The Black Lives Matter movement rejects the nuclear family as “white supremacy,” when the fundamental structure of household authority and covenantal family relationships are clearly seen as advantageous to the well-being and future success of our children. Without them, souls are adrift and caught in a treacherous spiral.

They diminish the nuclear family, and the result is more crime as young men and women grow up without a sense of who they are, without the role models and mentors who exemplify what is good and honorable, who teach their children to have a future story and to set goals and work hard to achieve those goals. All this has resulted in a tragic, predictable cycle that leads to generational dependence, poverty, hopelessness, crime, imprisonment, and an impregnable attitude of injustice. What remains is a devastating loss of human potential, intellect, and creativity.

Leftist and Liberal-Progressive policies have created and are responsible for the “system” that deprives people of their God-given dignity.

Courageous Americans have struggled and sacrificed to right the wrongs and ensure future generations can partake equally in the American dream. Civil rights leaders like Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, taught a non-violent approach to implement change, and he proclaimed a message based on timeless core values of love, forgiveness, and reconciliation in our shared relationships as fellow Americans. This has been discarded instead for Critical Race Theory which proclaims a message of racial division and racist lies. CRT crushes the souls of those they label as oppressed or oppressors and strains the all-important relationships that foster a sense of belonging and empower people to succeed.

A friend of mine recently said, “Humans have a God-shaped hole in them.” I agree with that premise and will assert we have tried to fill it with everything other than what will heal our souls. A big mess has been made, and what made the mess is not what will clean it up. Are we willing to pick up the right tools for the job?

The Leftist, and Liberal-Progressive ideology and secular culture are full of lies and empty promises. Their goal is the usurpation of authority to remove what is sacred and confer to us our God-given rights according to their own malleable, capricious perception and definition of “the greater good.” Their Godlessness can never fill the “God-shaped hole” in our individual and collective souls.

We stray from that which is God-given, good, and right at our peril. It is time for us who believe in what is sacred to keep the faith, act courageously, be tough when under attack, and call evil what it is. Therefore, I will speak humbly, but unapologetically, like the Christian reformer Martin Luther:

“My conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other, so help me God.”

Jeff M. Lewis is a Christian, a husband and father, a Veteran, and a small business owner who resides with his family in South Texas.

Image: The God-Shaped Hole (using clips from Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam).

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