Of all the defense mechanisms, denial is the easiest, the most pleasant, the most available of all the psychological options. One can repress unwanted feelings, project them onto some unlucky soul, or rationalize them into nonexistence, just to name a few. Denial, however, usually wins. I know it’s my favorite. The time the mother of a student called me to let me know that her son had brought a hatchet to school with the intent of using it on me, my first reaction was to deny that could be possible. It took her a while to convince me.

Denial is usually a matter of individual choice, and the consequences are born mostly by the denier, but in the last century denial has become a national pastime, a way of life, a worldview. We’ve gotten good at it; we believe the silliest things -- men can be women, drugs don’t need to be illegal, we can print money ad infinitum and there will be no problem. We think we can do away with 70 million babies and suffer no consequences. Why?

We think we can go through life denying the obvious because we have already succeeded in the biggest denial of all. We deny the existence of God. Our schools, in an effort to be inclusive and nonconfrontational, have been systematically teaching an atheist perspective by just not mentioning God, even while teaching math and history and science and literature -- all fraught with evidence of His existence. Even many of our churches shy away from teaching the most basic Christian doctrines. They may still give lip service to God, but they have turned Him into an ineffective cruise director. Even in our lighter moments God is absent -- our entertainment is almost entirely devoid of God, our music likewise, our art is sometimes downright blasphemous.

I occasionally tune into a FaceBook group that purports to discuss both evolutionary and theistic outlooks. What interests me about it is the vehemence with which the evolutionary/atheistic group engages. I found myself wondering why atheists would care so much that I believed in the Creator of the universe. What’s it to them? I suspect that they don’t want anyone to mess with their delusion; it’s precious to them because to deny God is to remove all expectations, all responsibility, all sense of unworthiness. I think of Dostoyevsky’s famous line, “Without God all things are permissible.” But then that itself is a delusion, a denial. God Is still functioning exactly as He was thousands of years ago, whether we accede to His existence, or not.

To deny the existence of God is to deny reality, and down that path lies insanity. And what if a large portion of a society takes part in that delusion? We see the results in two different kinds of nations. We find it in the societies that worship other gods -- the kind of gods imagined by people -- just as mercurial and vengeful as any neurotic human. We find it also in socialist/communist countries -- countries that have traded in God for government. Both types of societies are dysfunctional, poverty-stricken, hopeless places; it is the citizens of these kinds of nations that fuel the mass migrations to this country and to Europe. These maladjusted countries can add very little to the human experience; those poor folks can barely sustain their own existence.

So, what then? I recently listened to a Jordan Peterson speech in which he expressed his prescription for saving the West so very well. He said, “We need to tilt back toward God…”  Yes. Exactly.  We need to give up our Godless experiment, face the fact that as a people we are incapable of maintaining our shining-city-on-the-hill status on our own. Sans God and His guidelines, His expectations, His joy, it just can’t be done.

Why did we fall for this Godless lifestyle? For one thing, we’d grown rich enough to almost pull it off. We no longer had to work dawn to dusk to survive. We had way more than enough food, comfort, entertainment. And we had important people in white lab coats telling us that there was no creation -- that God was a myth. We watched movies in which God either wasn’t or He was represented by evil priests and pastors. And, as I said earlier, God was never mentioned in our schools.

Besides all that, God is scary. He is a tough taskmaster.  Pleasure -- in the short term -- is possible without Him, but we must go through Him to attain and maintain joy, and that is not only a challenge, it’s dangerous -- witness last week’s brutal murders of Davy and Natalie Lloyd, missionaries to Haiti. Witness the anti-abortion political prisoners, and the mass killings of Christians in Nigeria -- over 52,000 since 2023. Even if we aren’t physically threatened, living in gratitude to God is restrictive.

On the other hand, while life without restrictions, without expectations, without responsibilities is attractive, judging from the rampant use of addictive and dangerous drugs, the rising suicide rate, the rage that is eating up our youth, that kind of life must be thoroughly unfulfilling. Evidently free love is not the answer to happiness.

But tough love can be. Remember the late 60s when that phrase first came out? (Bill Milliken’s book of that title 1968). We were just coming out of our first taste of the hippie/druggy/flower child mindset and some people shook off the hangover and thought maybe that wasn’t the way to peace and happiness after all.  It was about then that Chuck Smith’s Jesus Movement took off and pulled thousands of the disillusioned back into sanity and a relationship with Almighty God. People began to see that true love involves self-discipline, sacrifice, and purpose. This is very similar to Jordan Peterson’s message -- tilt back to God. Pick up your cross and climb the hill in front of you. The world is much bigger, much more important, than your petty and pleasurable desires. (pardon the paraphrasing).

Now we’re seeing the same phenomenon happening on the beach in California, on college campuses here and there across the country. The thing is that humans were created to have a relationship with the God who created us. Our society was planted with God at the center, and we can’t go forever without Him. We can’t go on in this Godless denial and maintain our society. We have to take a deep breath and take the Big Tilt back to Him and His Word.

Deana Chadwell is an adjunct professor and department head at Pacific Bible College in southern Oregon. She teaches writing, logic, and literature. She can be contacted at 1window45@gmail.com

Image: I. Makarov