Written by Ed Straka

In his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, author Neil Postman describes the growth and outright dominance of the entertainment industry and the all-pervading influence it has had upon American culture. More to the point – the book illustrated how a culture could literally be dumbed down by the type of entertainment it dealt with and consisted of. Equally telling in the author’s mind was how much time was spent viewing and reading material that was as frivolously meaningless as it was sensual and vulgar.

Yet, and co-relative to the above was the unfortunate reality that people no longer spent time reading, thinking about, or discussing things of import (Phil. 4:8). Rather, they chose to contemplate the words of some popular gadfly, movie star or rap musician, or lose themselves in endless hours of television. In other words, Proverbs tells us that the fool’s eyes are in the ends of the earth (Proverbs 17:24), but in our case – it’s the TV, video games and the tabloids. Postman suggested that our media was used like the drug “Soma” in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to medicate the masses into complacency.

Now and Then

As much as I agree with Postman’s assessment of our culture and the mindless rabble it appears to be producing exponentially, I would also like to suggest there is an even greater and more pernicious threat out there today that not only invites people into an alternative world – but a world of randomness and outright oblivion. A world so absorbing, not to mention stimulating, that young people prefer it to reality – and in time – seem to detach themselves from reality.

Consider: When we were growing up, the big thing was movies. There were no video games, only Checkers, Monopoly and pinball games at the bowling alley and the big concern of our parents was sexuality. Hollywood then – as it continues to now – constantly pushed the envelope with both language and the dress code. The racier movies were a cause of concern for our parents who, more often than not, banished us into the other room where we lamented our excommunication from the world of adults which meant access to movies with bad language and loose dress codes.

This was only natural: our desire was for the things that adults were aware of and participated in, accentuated by the fact that our parents kept it from us. Even to this day sexuality is cause for concern not only in the sense of living in a carnal society that seeks to seduce everyone and everything, but also in the real world of teen pregnancy and the unfortunate abortion of those unwanted babies (despite the recent overturning of Roe vs. Wade).

What movies especially did for the young, however, was to teach us about the world and the things in it. Above all, it taught us to dream about being a hero and heroes generally did the right thing. Even Jimmy Cagney when playing a gangster on his way to the electric chair could be counted on to say that his life was a waste and he had made a mistake if it meant scaring some kids straight. The biggest downside to TV back then was we probably watched too much of it.

Stories had a definite beginning with a goal, a problem, a solution to the problem and the struggle to apply the solution. All stories had an ending which was clear to the eye of the beholder. When it was all said and done, we kids knew they were only movies although we wanted to be like the people we saw in those movies.

Ideas Within

Today, however, things are different. In fact, there is an even greater problem in society that is wrapped up in the very fiber of our youth culture today that goes beyond bad language and loose dress codes. This “problem” stems from the pens and typewriters of men who rule the world from the grave, philosophically speaking: Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, B.F. Skinner, and Jean Paul Sarte.

Each of these men had a profound, atheistic philosophy of life that influenced various academic disciplines and their perspective on the field of anthropology and what it means to be human. We don’t see it as clearly for two reasons:

First off, it is embedded in many of the movies, music, video games and comic books that our young people are involved with and if we do catch a glimpse, we just label it as “violent.”

Secondly, most people don’t study philosophy, so they don’t know the major players and the terms and phrases used by these men nor the implications of these terms and phrases when applied.

I can assure you, however, our modern media is much more than just “violent” but decidedly dangerous in terms of the human psyche because it stems from the internal dynamic latent within us all: sin. Modern technology amplifies sin and the desire for it with all the bells and whistles and unbelievable graphics. Equally, there is something latent within the various forms of media in terms of the ethos portrayed philosophically.

What’s not realized by most people is that many philosophers over the centuries perpetuated various non-Christian beliefs through their writings and these ideas ended up in educational institutions and the students of these educational institutions eventually graduated and joined mainstream America as educators, musicians, script writers and novelists.

Playtime?…

In time would come the world of high-tech video game developers who themselves pirated many of these ideas they encountered in a class, or in a movie or book, and used them to build what is called in movies a “story line” or “plot” and in the gaming world a “scenario.”

Some movies are obscene in the true sense of the word’s definition: it belongs “off stage” meaning it’s not necessary to advance the plot of the movie or play. Hollywood is replete with these movies and with the rise of Netflix we now have access to movies from abroad that have no moral sensibilities at all in terms of what they allow on screen.

Video games are not much better. Although I’ve never seen the games, nor did my boys buy them, there are games one can play featuring scenarios that can be anything from shooting up a school or public building to rape and out-right destruction of a city. I believe the most infamous such game is called “Grand Theft Auto.”

What needs to be understood is this: these are not just games and movies! They are philosophical & psychological conditioners that proselytize a specific world and life view that is antithetical to Christianity. Equally, it is a world designed to draw us in because it panders to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life (1 John 2:16): the very things the script writers and game designers have given themselves over to (Jude 1:8).

The themes of most of these novels or movie story lines or video game “scenarios” are built on the witch’s brew of atheism and historical relativism and the reality of what men and women are capable of who were influenced by the ideas of the above-mentioned men if not restrained by a transcendent moral code.

In other words, if the above-mentioned men, and those like them are correct, and there is no fixed reference point in the universe residing metaphysically in an actual God – then there can be no ultimate standard of right and wrong to base morality upon. A prospect which leaves the human race “home alone” as it were, driven by the blind forces of nature which itself is driven by unknowable forces of biological necessity and determinism and nothing else. Man is all impulse and exercises his will with no remorse (1 Corinthians 2:14).

It is this world of relativism mixed in with the idea of man as animal trained by unknown outside forces with no beginning, no purpose, and thus no real goal in life that acts as the backdrop for these games and the various novels and movies available to young people today. All of which is designed to show that there is no ultimate meaning to life: only a colorful, high-tech invitation into the Void.

Granted, my generation caught glimpses of endless, violent life with little purpose in Clint Eastwood westerns and Charles Bronson fighter movies, yet these characters still portrayed a sense of crude justice and generally defended the weak and put down bad guys. Things are different now.

The dominating thing in all the movies, music, comic books, and games today is the quest for three things: ecstasy, escape or power. Each of those concepts has its appeal to different individuals for all human beings have a sinful tendency. But for those to whom God is a non-existent entity these three things are the focus of life, as opposed to what Scripture admonishes us to focus upon (Philippians 4:8).

When It’s All Said and Done

Understand: I’m not suggesting if you or your child plays a video game you will both become a nutcase. I am suggesting that those whose total free time is spent in the world of unreality end up with difficulty when faced with reality and will utilize those tools they have been “evangelized” with via entertainment (1 John 4:3). The new Avatar movie is case and point: history sold with fantastic colors, special effects and graphics that in the end suggests that Western Civilization is cruel, greedy and selfish and if we could only return to the pristine past of the noble savage – in this case blue with tails – all would be well. Ironically, the very system that Cameron castigates is the social-economics system responsible for his great wealth and fame as a director, but what’s $700,000,000 have to do with it?

Thus, as parents who seek to raise their children as well as educate them intentionally for hopes of a brighter, productive future serving in the Kingdom of God, it is important to realize that “education” does not stop with the homeschooling lesson of the day but continues with your child’s entertainment (1 Corinthians 15:33; ESV).

Choose wisely!

Edward Straka has spent most of his adult life in education having taught at the collegiate level  as well as the high school level in the areas of Ancient and Medieval History, U.S. History, World View, Economics and US Government. He has pastored churches in Wisconsin and Mississippi and taught Japanese at Honda of America, and Piqua Community College in Ohio. He has written both historical fiction and futuristic dystopian fiction with a bio-ethical slant as well as nonfiction social theory books available on Amazon. Currently, Mr. Straka teaches Theology and is the acting Director of Christian Liberty Homeschools headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois, yet having students throughout the world.

This article was originally published by our friends at Christian Liberty Homeschools.

When Vice President Kamala Harris gave a speech on the 50^th anniversary of “Roe v. Wade” about a week ago, she infamously left out the Creator—when talking about our rights. One wag told me, “Hey, at least Kamala didn’t say, we ‘are created by … you know, the thing,’” as did her boss on the campaign trail.

She also left out the “right to life.” But does this oversight matter? I addressed her “right to life” omission in a previous piece, but what about leaving out the Creator? Who cares?

We all should. The essence of America is self-rule under God. Leave out either part, and we end up with tyranny. Without God as the secure source of our rights, from whence come those rights?

Thomas Jefferson said, and you can see this quote in the Jefferson Memorial: “And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God?”

Why does God matter? The late Clay Christensen was a Harvard Business professor who hosted a 90-second video segment that brilliantly shows why He matters.

Christensen says that ultimately we must choose between internal versus external restraint. In explaining to a visiting student from China how religion benefits American society by bolstering morality, Christensen makes the point that we can’t hire enough police to make people good. But democracy has greatly benefited through the internal restraints that religion provides.

William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, would concur. He once noted, “If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants.”

Within a few years of America’s revolt against British rule, the French had their revolution. Some like to compare the American with the French Revolution. They were totally different because of the God factor. The American Revolution was pro-God. The French Revolution was anti-God. That is the difference in a nutshell.

For the documentaries in my Foundation of American Liberty series for Providence Forum, I had the privilege to interview Dennis Prager, the founder of PragerU. At one point in the interview, he contrasted these two turbulent events.

He told me, “The American Revolution and French Revolution is the battle in the United States.  Which revolution will prevail? … They loathe the idea of God in the French Revolution; the secular republic was the ideal. In America, they believed in secular government, but in a God-based society, because rights come from God in America. And you can only have liberty if you have God.”

Prager pointed out that this was not a “faith statement” so much as a “logical” one: “People will either feel accountable for their behavior to God or the state. Those are your two choices. It is an absurdity to believe they’ll be good if they’re accountable only to themselves. If you’re only accountable to yourself, you will always justify what you do.”

And so he concludes, “God is the ultimate issue.”

Take the issue of the value of human life. When you remove God from the equation, life becomes cheap. Because we’re made in the image of God, human life has value.

Human beings are different than the animals, says the Bible. Recently I read portions of a great book, The Death of Humanity: And The Case For Life” by history professor Dr. Richard Weikart, who wrote the classic book, From Darwin to Hitler.

Dr. Weikart writes, “Western society is in deep trouble today. Once we identify some segments of humanity as ‘life unworthy of life’ or ‘sub-human,’ to use phrases commonly used before and during the Nazi period, we have jettisoned any basis for valuing humans as humans. We have effectively undermined all human rights, because now we can decide which humans have rights and which do not.”

In contrast, the founders of America said in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are the right to life.” The first right they listed is the right to life.

In the Declaration, the signers mention God four times, including their appeal “to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions,” referring to Jesus, whom God, the Bible says, has appointed to judge us all one day.

But if there’s no Creator, as some politicians seem to think, why should there be any human right? As retired Congressman Ron Paul once noted, “There is only one kind of freedom and that’s individual liberty. Our lives come from our creator and our liberty comes from our creator. It has nothing to do with government granting it.”

This article was originally published at JerryNewcombe.com.

Written by Worth Loving

Recently, Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest (R-N.C.) came under fire for comments he made regarding Planned Parenthood and its founder, Margaret Sanger. Speaking to an MLK Day breakfast at Upper Room Church of God in Christ in Raleigh, Forest said this: “There is no doubt that when Planned Parenthood was created, it was created to destroy the entire black race. That was the purpose of Planned Parenthood. That’s the truth.” Forest later defended his comments to McClatchy News:

“The facts speak for themselves. Since 1973, 19 million black babies have been aborted, mostly by Planned Parenthood. I care too much about the lives of these babies to debate the intent of Sanger’s views when the devastation she brought into this world is obvious.”

Margaret Sanger, her sister, Ethel Byrne, and Fania Mindell opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York on October 16, 1916. The clinic was later raided by the NYPD, and all three women were arrested and charged with violating the Comstock Act for distributing obscene materials. After laws governing birth control were relaxed, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, which was renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942.

While Lieutenant Governor Forest was attacked by many on the Left for pushing an uneducated, insensitive agenda, history backs him up. The fact is that Margaret Sanger strongly believed the Aryan race to be superior and that it must be purified, a view that finds its roots from Charles Darwin’s defense of evolution in The Origin of Species. Darwin argued that a process of “natural selection” favored the white race over all other “lesser races.” Sanger advocated for eugenics by calling for abortion and birth control among the “unfit” to produce a master race, a race consisting solely of wealthy, educated whites. Sanger said she believed blacks were “human weeds” that needed to be exterminated. She also referred to immigrants, African Americans, and poor people as “reckless breeders” and “spawning…human beings who never should have been born.”

Sanger once wrote “that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets.” In an effort to sell her birth control and abortion proposals to the black community, Sanger said: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” In 1926, Sanger was also the featured speaker at a women’s auxiliary meeting of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

Sanger opened her clinics in largely minority neighborhoods because she believed immigrants and the working class were inferior and needed their population controlled so as to purify the human race. That trend continues today where almost 80 percent of Planned Parenthood facilities are located in minority neighborhoods. In fact, although only 13 percent of American women are black, over 35 percent of all black babies are aborted in the United States every year. Abortion is the leading cause of death for blacks in the United States. According to Students for Life of America, “more African-Americans have died from abortion than from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined.” Black babies are about five times more likely to be aborted than whites. On Halloween in 2017, Planned Parenthood’s “Black Community” Twitter account tweeted: “If you’re a Black woman in America, it’s statistically safer to have an abortion than to carry a pregnancy to term or give birth.”

While Margaret Sanger tried to portray Planned Parenthood as a merciful organization that helps needy families, the facts speak for themselves. In her testimony to the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in September 2015, former Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards openly admitted that over 80 percent of her organization’s annual revenue comes from performing abortions and not basic health care for poor or disadvantaged women. When you dive deeper, well over 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s annual revenue comes from performing abortions.

Despite this sordid history, Margaret Sanger is almost universally recognized as a pioneer for women’s rights rather than the racist she actually was. When accepting Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that she “admired Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision…I am really in awe of her.” Those like Hillary Clinton are ignoring the explicitly racist statements that Margaret Sanger made throughout her life. The fact is that Sanger normalized birth control and abortion in the United States as a means to accomplish eugenics. Her ultimate goal was to eliminate non-white races, people with sickness or disabilities, children born to felons, the poor, and immigrants, to name a few.

Margaret Sanger is no heroine, and Planned Parenthood is not some merciful health care provider as the Left paints it to be. Margaret Sanger repeatedly stated her racist intentions for the whole world to see and hear, and Planned Parenthood was and still is the manifestation of those racist ideologies. America was founded on the idea that no matter your race, creed, national origin, disability, or station in life, everyone who comes here or is born here has the opportunity to live a successful, fulfilling life. Margaret Sanger didn’t believe that.

As pro-life activists, we must do our part to expose Margaret Sanger for who she really was. We must also expose the racist history of Planned Parenthood and how that history is still relevant today. For more information on Margaret Sanger and the racist roots of Planned Parenthood, check out these FRC resources: Planned Parenthood Is Not Pro-Woman and The Real Planned Parenthood: Leading the Culture of Death.

This article was originally published at the FRC Blog.

The world is quickly becoming over-populated. There is not enough water, food, fuel or other natural resources to sustain us all. We will soon be faced with a “survival of the fittest” class struggle, as the “have-nots” contend with the “haves” for land and property rights, in an attempt to stay alive during the coming economic apocalypse that ensues. Billions will starve to death (or worse) as every blade of grass is consumed by the ever-encroaching urban sprawl and demand for limited services.

At least this is the neo-Marxist narrative the socialist / globalist journalist, politicians and educrats want you to believe.

How Did We Get Here?

Whence did all these stories of over-population, limited resources, carbon footprint, etc. originate?

Thomas Malthus (1766-1846), wrote a book in 1798 entitled, An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society. He hypothesized that “… the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.”

Charles Darwin (1809-1888) was influenced by Malthusian theory. Darwin’s 1859 book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, created a world where only the physical reality matters. The soul of humans was diminished, and people quickly became reduced to resource-consuming units. Social Darwinism soon developed the concept that only the strongest should be allowed to survive, and that often was the “white race.” Eugenics, a practice of eliminating unwanted elements of the population through whatever pragmatic means was currently culturally accepted (or whatever you could get away with), was a driving worldview behind Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

Eugenics advocate, Margaret Sanger (1879-1966), the founder of Planned Parenthood, invented the term, “birth control,” and raised $150,000 for research leading to the first birth control pill in 1951. Sanger promoted “a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.” —“A Plan for Peace,” Birth Control Review, April 1932, pages 107-108

Radical environmentalism placed the continued survival of the species as a primary virtue (with all of the devotion of a religion). We must save the planet, so we can all survive. If that means killing off large segments of our population (through abortion or other means), so be it.

Margaret Sanger, who intentionally set up abortion clinics in African-American neighborhoods, declared: “The most serious evil of our times is that of encouraging the bringing into the world of large families. The most immoral practice of the day is breeding too many children,” she continued “The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.” —“Woman and the New Race,” 1920, Chapter 5: The Wickedness of Creating Large Families.

The Over-Population Myth

The real fact is that we have plenty of land and natural resources to accommodate our growing population. Of course, we should be good stewards of the earth, and find renewable resources, but we need to stop seeing children as a pestilence to be exterminated, and view them as they are; emerging innovators who can create a more sustainable future for us all.

The doomsayers with this message have consistently been proven wrong. Fifty years ago, Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, wrote: “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

He also predicted the average age of death would be 42 by 1980, and the oceans could rise 250 feet because of melting ice caps (anyone wonder where Al Gore got his nonsense?). Ehrlich was certainly a false prophet. While poverty, hunger, and lack of adequate drinking water are present realities in many parts of the globe, these problems are almost always created by corrupt and oppressive governments, poor infrastructure, inefficiency (wasted food), lack of technology (shortage of water wells), war, and even cultural superstition (like in India where their religious beliefs have created food shortages by not allowing mice and rats to be killed, or cattle to be eaten for food, ceremonial bathing in drinking water, etc.).

False over-population myths have been responsible for many of the over 60 million abortions since Roe v. Wade in 1973. The truth is, there is room for every person on this planet to stand shoulder to shoulder within the city limits of Los Angeles, CA. It’s not a space issue, it’s a stewardship issue.

Despising Children

While not self-consciously pro-eugenics, the philosophical descendants of Malthus, Darwin, Sanger and Ehrlich have produces a negative view of children in our culture.

Children are not a negative drain on a society, they are, in the words of the Psalm 127 in the Bible, “a reward.” Population growth through birth rate9 is one of the prerequisites of a healthy economy. What is scary, is not child birth, but rather a massive aging population who have trusted their government to pay for their retirement (with funds long past spent). Our current Social Security system for the immense Baby Boomer generation is being funded by the current labor and taxation of Gen X and Millennials.

The problem is, in western culture, we’ve almost either killed off, or prevented the conception of, an entire generation of scientists, doctors, nurses, farmers, technicians, engineers and inventors. If we weren’t thinking of this in theological terms (considering the sovereignty of God), one might speculate that the scientist who would have discovered the universal cure for cancer may have been murdered in the womb.

A society needs a fertility rate of 2.1 births children per (hopefully married) woman to sustain population levels and maintain a stable economy. What we see happening in many part of Europe is a society driving full speed towards an economic cliff (not to mention a moral one!).

Demographics from the World Bank demonstrate a fall in global fertility rates from about 5.0 in 1960, to under 2.5 today. In 2015 in Europe the 10 worst economies, (with their accompanying birthrates beside it) were (from worst to better): Finland (1.6), Greece (1.3), Estonia (1.6), Portugal (1.3), Austria (1.5), Netherlands (1.7), Italy (1.4), Belgium (1.7), France (2.0), and Germany (1.5). None of these countries are above the 2.1 threshold for sustainability.

Muslims are quickly taking over population centers in Europe through a much higher than average birth rate. Muslims recognize the value of child-birth as a means for cultural domination. America only slightly exceeds a 2.1 growth rate, but that is due to immigration, not birth rate. As our birth rate slows to match that of Europe, we can expect to see our productivity decrease as well.

The Solution

Many nations, including China, Japan, Israel and others are seeking to encourage their citizens to have more children now, not less. The problem is, the anti-child and anti-family worldview is so ingrained in many cultures, people are now avoiding marriage and child-bearing altogether. STD’s are on the rise (so sexual activity is likely on the rise) but marriage and raising children within a committed marriage is despised.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that birth alone solves these complex economic problems. There is far more to a stable society, and robust economy that human bodies taking up land mass. What is needed is for a healthy family culture to emerge. Committed, monogamous, heterosexual marriages provide the best context for raising good citizens. Children need both fathers and mothers to help guide them into life’s complex maze of choices. We do not merely need to give birth to babies; we need to train them well how to become contributing adults. Divorce and parental absenteeism has given us a generation of lost young adults who are struggling to find their way through emotional pain, and subsequent substance abuse. They need the stability only a loving family can provide.

The key is to raise the next generation to understand their responsibility to be producers and nor mere consumers. Entertainment, government subsidies and dumbed-down educational systems have created youth who have a major entitlement complex. They’ve had free daycare, free government schooling, free meals at school, and even in many cases, free college that wasn’t merit-based. The growing acceptance of marijuana and other addictive substances have sapped ambition and is crippling what is left of the American work ethic. Many of them sit back, waiting on the government to take care of them throughout their life. Young adults like this will never successfully lead us into the future.

While information is essential for our global economy, we must also continue to produce goods and services. This is where parents are going to have to work hard to combat the indoctrination towards government dependency being inculcated in our nation’s youth from a very young age.

I’ve never been one to merely preach at others, while not taking my own advice. At the time of this writing, my wife and I are eagerly awaiting the birth of our tenth child in just a few short months. We have never been on government assistance, and we support them all, and teach them a good work ethic (age appropriate of course) from the time they are young. We homeschool them entirely by ourselves and will save taxpayers over a million dollars just between K-12 by not putting them into government schools.

We patiently endure the sarcastic and snarky comments of perfect strangers who ask us, “Do you know what causes that?!” or “Are they all yours?! Surely you aren’t planning to have more?!” Many of those casting shade at us have children who are on drugs or have been in jail for felonies. We don’t take offense at their rudeness and ignorance. We have our eyes set on a higher goal. We are preparing these young ones to be successfully in life: Physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. We are teaching them how to love and care for their neighbors, and how to solve problems, rather than create them. It’s not for the faint of heart, but our great country wasn’t built by people who shrank back from challenges. It was built by people of strong moral courage and tenacious convictions.

It is my hope that conservatives will stop reading from the playbooks of the progressive, leftist, Eugenic, social engineers, and will return to what make America great: Faith, family (including children) and freedom. These universal principles never fail. Join with me in helping to make America great again…by seeing once again that value of our children (our future).

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It seems that America is now locked in an endless loop of tension and violence. Many disaffected Americans are railing out at a government they see as being abusive and vindictive. Movements like “Black Lives Matter” have pitted some African-American (and other) citizens against police officers, in a vicious cycle of street demonstrations and police force.

In some ways, these tensions are not new, and can be traced all the way to the American Civil War, through segregation, the Civil Rights Movement up to today. Americans have always been deeply divided on issues of race, and equal rights.

Now, police are being targeted in random shootings by those who feel anger at what they view as a system of oppression and tyranny.

The question is, where will all of this end?

There are really two facets to this situation that must be explored if we hope to understand the roots of this predicament.

Racism and Prejudice

What very few people stop to consider is the roots of all so-called “racial” prejudice. As Bible-believing Christians, we believe that God “has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). From one man, and one woman, all of the more than seven billion people on planet earth have descended. That makes all of us related by blood. We are all part of the same race: The Human Race!

Racial prejudice comes mainly out of evolutionary teachings. If you study the roots of the Eugenics movement, you will see that it is based in the view that some people groups are more highly evolved than others. Very few people know the full title of Charles Darwin’s ground-breaking 1859 book on evolution. It is called, “On Origin of Species, by Way of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”

Over 150 years of evolutionary teaching has saturated our culture, and has convinced many that we must struggle for the strongest races to survive. The solution to prejudice is found in the hope offered in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Not only are we all equal in creation, and therefore equal in value, the Apostle Paul declared, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28).

Anarchy vs. Totalitarianism

The other consideration in this situation is the age-old struggle between a desire for freedom from authority (on the one hand) and a demand for supreme authority by the State (on the other). This tension has always existed in every society. There is a rogue spirit in humankind that wants to be free from the bonds of restriction and law. But a lawless society, where everyone makes up their own rules (moral relativism), and where people’s passions run unchecked (hedonism), is not tenable. No civilization can bear up under the weight of an antinomian mindset (a believe that all law is bad).

When a culture begins to shake itself from moral law, it soon finds itself at the mercy of an ever-encroaching government that seeks to provide stability and regulation. The response to anarchy is always totalitarianism, and the response to tyranny is almost always rebellion, which leads to the cycle of more tyranny.

This situation is only remedied when people recognize that there is a universal moral law that exists outside of themselves, and to which they are all subservient. Once again, we find the solution to both extremes within the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The entire “Sermon on the Mount,” puts external law in the only place where it ultimately works; inside the human heart.

Until the evil of the heart is addressed, we are simply trying to put a cultural bandage on a proverbial brain tumor. No amount of political posturing will make bad people want to do good. It is only when the human heart is changed by love that we will hope to see citizens desire to do good, rather than harm, to their neighbor. It is only when we forgive, rather than seeking another eye or tooth in retaliation for harm, that we can end the vicious cycle of bloodshed and violence.

Ultimately, Christianity provides a totally unique remedy in the history of ideas. Every other worldview teaches that we must solve our own problems through human effort and initiative. Christianity, in contrast, presents us as the heart of the problem, not the solution. The Bible insists that it is only through humility and repentance that we will find healing for our own souls, and then be able to extend that grace and healing to others.

May God grant us that grace of repentance and humility as we seek to walk through the turbulent days that lie ahead.