When America was formed, the foundation was God; the Founding documents were drawn from a Judeo-Christian ethic.  Today, God has been shown the door, along with right and wrong.  Today, everything is right and nothing is wrong.  The distinction between good and evil is passé.

When Time magazine's 1966 cover asked, "Is God Dead?," many cheerfully shouted "YES!," but they had no idea what they were cheering.  God is not dead.  He is very much alive and doing what He does — He acts.  He has kept America alive as a free nation for now.  God is not only not dead; He is not inactive, either.  But He is cheesed off.  We kicked him out of schools, out of the public square, out of businesses, and even out of churches in some cases.  There will be judgment.

Did you know there is an atheist chaplain at Harvard?  He said this:

There is a rising group of people who no longer identify with any religious tradition but still experience a real need for conversation and support around what it means to be a good human and live an ethical life," Epstein told The New York Times. "We don't look to a god for answers. We are each other's answers."

Meaning we are all gods with the answers.  If you are an atheist psychologist or ethicist, perhaps that is true.  You don't look to God.  But anyone, especially one who calls himself a "chaplain," who says the answers come solely from "each other," is sadly mistaken.  Human beings, with few Solomonic exceptions, are not known for being cosmically wise or having the best answers.

In the past ten years, those calling themselves Christians have declined, but it can be safely assumed that God is threshing His floors, separating the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad, the redeemed from the unredeemed.  Both the Old and New Testaments refer to the threshing floor as a symbol of judgment.  When people turn away from God, as America is doing, they will be like chaff on a threshing floor.

America is experiencing a threshing-floor sorting.  GotQuestions.Org, far and away one of the best Christian information websites, talks about God separating believers from nonbelievers.

John the Baptist uses the imagery of the threshing floor to describe the coming Messiah who would separate the true believers from the false. ... The wicked are often described as chaff that the wind drives away (Psalm 1:4; Isaiah 17:13). Similar imagery of the good grain being separated from the worthless weeds appears in the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:36–43).

Using a different analogy, God is separating the sheep (believers) from the goats (unbelievers).

All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.  He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.' (Matthew 25)

Notice "since the creation of the world."  All of these God/atheist movements on the planet were put in place long before America was founded.  America's wheels are being turned by the Driver.

The Bible warns people that the gates of hell are wide and so most will enter there, but that the gate to heaven is very narrow and few will enter.  This, too, refers to a plan having been put in place long before America:

Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it. (Matthew 25)

One reason so many people lose their faith is because it is far easier to lose it than to keep it, which is why the gate is narrow.  It was always the plan for most to miss the mark and for few to find it.

When God founded America, He provided a wide gate and a narrow gate.  But with free will, He also provided that Americans have a choice.  Increasingly and unfortunately, Americans are choosing the wide gate.  But this is exactly as it was foreordained: not everyone will get to heaven.  In fact, not many will get there at all.

So when we mourn the fact that in America, people of God are dwindling in number, we need to remind ourselves that it is precisely God's plan that this be so.

Image: Wayne Hsieh.