The Selling of Godlessness to Americans

The Temple in Rexburg, Idaho

Twice in recent months I have received as an email an MSNBC voting page on the subject of whether the words "In God We Trust" should be removed from our coinage. 88% of us wanted the line kept. That should please me, and I guess it does, but I'm alarmed that fully 12% of those interviewed felt that the phrase amounted to an establishment of religion by the government and therefore a violation of the Church and State rule which so many see as the most important part of the first amendment to the Constitution.

Satan is very real and very patient. It has taken him more than sixty years since World War II to get 12% of us to be offended by the mention of our Father in Heaven on public coinage. That was the same World War II in which people went around saying, "There are no atheists in fox holes." That same time period has also seen the removal of the Ten Commandments from court houses while other famous codes of law, such as the Code of Hammurabi, continue to be displayed and honored. Hammurabi was a Babylonian tough guy, so it's OK to quote his laws. Moses was a prophet of the living God, so he must not be quoted.

I recall very clearly an episode of the old Daniel Boone television show in which an angry man said some irreligious things to the title character. Boone not only answered the man's argument, but he also said loudly, "I'll not stand for blasphemy." I heard my mother mutter, "Well, yes!" She knew what was right and what was wrong. A couple of years later the crew of the Enterprise, found itself on a planet where some of the old Greek Gods had gone to retire. They were excited that they would have people around to worship them again. But Captain Kirk said, "We've outgrown you. We don't need you any more." They faded away on the wind and were seen no more. I was only in high school, but something about that made me very uncomfortable. It wasn't a fear that maybe we still needed to believe in the various pantheons of non-existent gods and goddesses whom the ancients believed ran their lives with capricious cruelty. I finally realized after remembering that episode many times over many years that Kirk's statement implied that a technologically advanced society didn't need ANY gods.

And sure enough! A series of films about a little boy whose father was Satan became a huge hit in the seventies. He could not be defeated or destroyed, because Satan was his dad. I saw a couple of these films on late night TV years after they were made. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I knew that Satan could only get power over those who gave it to him by seeking him out and by obeying his directions. I also knew that Satan is a spirit who has never been given a body and who therefore has very little influence over physical things.

Other films came along, often preceded by novels which helped many people take the whole mythos of the stories more seriously. Some of the stories had to do with children who had been possessed. Catholic Priests, who had no real priesthood, would expend their energies and finally give their lives to save the children from the evil Spirits. The films dabble so much in real Satanism that many people said they had to get up and leave the theater, because the feeling of evil there was so terrifying. One of Shayne's brothers, a very tough young fellow, said he'd never seen anything as horrible as Rosemary's Baby. He was still frightened by its negative spiritual power months after having seen it.

It became quite a cult. Many movies, both well-made and cheap, grabbed onto the coattails of Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist and sold tickets very successfully. Popular music began to join in the shift of public attitudes. Some preached anarchy. Other songs preached the pointlessness of life and the easy way out of life's pain - suicide. Many children did commit suicide. Many others tried.

In the Eighties we began to hear of songs which openly preached that murder and especially the murder of police officials was a desirable thing and a great accomplishment. Police Fraternities sued recording artists and their industry.

Screenwriters, not to be outdone, began in the Seventies and even more in the Eighties to feed us a steady fare of wounded doubters. These were people you could sympathize with, because crime or war or disease or the general unfairness of life had caused suffering in their lives. Always the screenwriter would express his or her own doubts through the mouths of the characters. "No GOD would have let that happen." "Where was God when she was suffering and dying?" "How could a God let an innocent person suffer like that?" "I was faithful all my life, but it didn't do me a bit of good; He took my child anyway."

These statements were sometimes designed to fly in the face of a God whose existence was still not doubted. Others expressed doubt and even seemed to express certainty that He didn't and couldn't exist, because he had failed some human test of minimal goodness or real power.

By the Nineties, practically no TV show even mentioned Christ in their Christmas episodes. Variety shows of the fifties and sixties had seen choirs and orchestras and solo artists sing hymns and carols to thank Christ for his sacrifice and to thank the Father for His birth. But not any more. The cartoons began as early as the sixties to invent new myths in place of scriptural truths. Even the Grinch, a well written children's poem about the conversion from curmudgeon and thief to loving, generous citizen of the fellow who lived on top of Mt. Crumpet, never actually got around to saying anything about God, Christ, the Atonement, or anything really religious at all. True, the animated cartoon version of the book did include a sweet little choir number of a religious sound, but it said nothing ...nothing at all.

About twenty years ago a film was made called Baby Boom. A high-powered business executive inherits her British cousin's baby girl and discovers that, as good as she is at managing an advertising firm, she's even more of a natural as a mom. While interviewing candidates for the job of daytime nanny, she asks a southern girl what brought her to New York City. When the girl answers somewhat rustically, "The Lord," the protagonist poorly hides her horror that anyone could actually believe that a God was guiding her life, and moves on quickly to the next candidate. That was twenty years ago and already we had reached the point at which God was a joke. The notion of His reality and His power to influence our lives and our world for good was absurd, particularly to people of education.

Remember Church Lady on Saturday Night Live? This was a genuinely funny character. The fellow who played her had a rubber face, great timing, and a gift for lampooning the hypocrisy of some people in organized religion. But, as we laughed at Church Lady every Saturday night over several years, we gradually became desensitized to the broad sweeps of the brush with which she painted religion. Church Lady was a hypocrite. Then religionists must be hypocrites. Church Lady had a paranoia about Satan. So Satan must not be a real threat or even a real entity. Church Lady had lots of suppressed sexual frustration. So anyone who is sincere about living the commandments regarding sexual purity must be some kind of a nut.

Then came 9/11 in the year 2001. There was a brief spate of outrage and religious fervor, but lots of us quickly cooled down when we realized that we'd actually have to make sacrifices in order to defeat the terrorist organizations behind the four hijackings and the nearly 3,000 deaths on that dreadful day. And then some of us began to take seriously the threats from those who were behind the attacks. The extremist Moslems say that we have been unkind to them by not allowing them to destroy the state of Israel and by selling arms to the Israelis since 1948. Well, then, said many of us, we'd better stop doing those things. We don't want to make them mad. Let's apologize to the world for our "arrogance" as Mr. Obama did just the other day. This attitude is what was practiced in 1939 by Prime Minister Neville chamberlain. His political opponent, who had warned for years that the "heartless guttersnipe," Hitler, would start another war no matter how much he was given to bribe him out of it, called Mr. Chamberlain "an appeaser." "An appeaser," explained Mr. Churchill, "is one who feeds the crocodile, hoping it will eat him last."

And now where are we? A new pandemic is beginning around the world. Wars and civil wars are all over Africa and central America and are even pushing across our southern U.S. border. Our economy is in a shambles. More than ever we need to repent. We need to turn back to God and serve Him and live his commandments so that He will be able to bless us as He so longs to do.

But humility and penitence don't come easily to those who don't believe in God. Prayer doesn't come easily to those who believe that Satan may be just as strong as God and might have real power to save us. And people who have never read scripture and never prayed don't come easily into a state of teachability and humility so that the Spirit of God can dwell with them, help them solve their problems, save them from disease, and deliver them from their enemies. It is in times like these that "the Devil laughs and his angels rejoice." We've given him plenty of cause.