While the leftist choir sings the "Trump Racism and Hate" tune, hasn't their godless worldview, propagated overtly since the sixties, provided for an existential despair among the disenfranchised and a host of other problems?

Last month, I joined the growing ranks of septuagenarians.  Seven decades of life grants one some insight in making sense of the present in light of the past.  Through the revolutionary sixties to the God is dead seventies and the decades beyond, there is little argument that our culture has been notably slouching toward Gomorrah.  Indications recently are that we have significantly picked up the pace.  While there may be many facets to this cultural degradation, there is a root cause hiding in plain sight for someone whose life has spanned this period.

I grew up as one of those Midwesterners in the basket of deplorables.  In the sixties, our little church-steepled town was filled with folks whose lives were largely family- and faith-based; our faith defined us.  Its morality guided us.  It was not a clinging to religion.  Often, back then, before we even had driver's licenses, a friend and I would walk through town to the nearby railroad tracks to hunt pheasants with our fathers' shotguns in hand.  In high school, some with driver's licenses chauffeured the rest of us, all with shotguns, around the countryside on pheasant-hunting Saturdays, or on weekdays, in the hour right after school.  No doubt, there were countless others like us in mostly rural America.

A little later, shotguns and rifles were ubiquitous in college dorm room closets and readily accessible.  However, we were also armed with the principles of safety and respect for the law and the property of others.  All of this was part of our upbringing and instilled values.  Ours was a culture closely tied to the rich soil of the Heartland but with consciences enlivened by biblical precepts on how to live.  Comparatively, there was barely a noteworthy crime, let alone any mass shootings such as those most recently in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio.

Not coincidentally, my friends and I, all college graduates and most with postgraduate professional or academic degrees, still have guns and hunt, as do millions of others who are not racist, bigoted, or white supremacists, as the Left likes to portray us.  Nor are any of the millions of us any danger to our fellow citizens.  If these mass shooting incidents show any good reason for additional gun control, it's not because the radical Left has come up with it.  Like a chorus of frogs croaking in the night, the mostly vacuous Democrat presidential candidates show either complete obliviousness or a refusal to look for the deeper "heart" problems involved or provide more foundational solutions.  They are not to be trusted with any of it.

I suggest some specific occurrences from the sixties that partially, but importantly, explain the change in the mental climate of the nation.  In the mid-sixties, the BSCS (Biological Science Curriculum Study) affirming a materialistic, macro-evolutionary process for all of life was introduced into public education, teaching that everything in the universe can be explained by materialistic causes and in materialistic terms.  This is a philosophy, a worldview, not the "hard" science that it is taught as.  Secondly, the Supreme Court decided against prayer and the reading of Scripture in public schools.  More than a half-century of this liberal, naturalistic philosophy of beginnings has permeated all aspects of the culture; religion and its moral basis for living were inextricably extirpated from our daily, public life, growing the aggregate liberal fruit that now is all too familiar to us.  This was not at all Thomas Jefferson's separation of church and state, often ignorantly blathered about.

To the point of the "outlier" shooters involved in these mass shootings, aside from all the other factors involved, once that persons decides that life is not worth living and that the murder of others seems an appropriate revenge for his anger, that as a social "loser," there is value and no cost in the instant notoriety the mass media afford, does the prevailing belief in a purely materialistic universe with no God and no absolutes provide just the impetus "to go out in a blaze of glory"?

Alexis de Tocqueville said this about religion in his Democracy in America:

Religion in America ... must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitated the use of it.  Indeed, it is in this same point of view that the inhabitants of the United States themselves look upon religious belief.  I do not know whether all inhabitants of the United States have a sincere faith in their religion — for who can search the human heart?  But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of the republic.

It's obvious things have changed.  It's too bad we now not only don't hold faith indispensable to the maintenance of the republic, but consider it anachronistic.  We ignore God and reject religion at great expense, and only for a while.