American Cohesion Cannot Co-Exist With Secularism

If we can't define what unites us, is it any wonder that we're in chaos?

America stands apart from Western nations of the past because it is not united based on shared ethnicity as one would see in the German, English, or French cultures of old. So its identity must be predicated on something else. Historically, Americans were raised to feel united on the basis of shared values, a shared central faith, a noble history, and the ideal that anyone could prosper and have his variant of the “American dream”. Now, we live in a time when none of this seems certain.

Those who enter American colleges and some high schools are educated about the woes of American history, in which America is compared with a utopia, and found wanting. While most Americans still identify with some variant of Christianity, the idea of it being a uniting force seems laughable. Most reject the idea of basing public policy on Christian ideals, for example. It seems implausible that we could even generate a list of shared values that the majority of people could agree to. After all, we live in a time when there is no unity on such constants as whether man and women are interchangeable and gender itself is malleable. The existence of tremendous wealth mobility in American life created a culture that was perceivably fair — that a person’s financial situation was the product of his effort. In the wake of COVID-excused shutdowns, small and medium-sized businesses were forcibly closed, which resulted in a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the ultra-rich. The long-term effects of this bureaucratic disaster will last for decades, impacting not just the financial disparities, but also having ramifications for those who wish to seek gainful employment at businesses that value the humanity of the employees, such as by not coercing them into unwanted vaccination.

If one accepts that modern Americans have no sense of shared direction, then the chaos that we see around us was long inevitable. Instead of seeking remedy for this state of being, the dominant class parrots the narrative that we must succeed through the embrace of diversity. However, diversity makes for an almost polar opposite of unity. We do not become more united through difference. Even in small circles, our friends become such through shared interests and values, not through the absence of such connection.

The attempt by the ruling class to decimate every uniting force that once bound American society cannot be by mere accident. It’s not hyperbole to say that those people seek the ruin of the United States, when their actions demonstrate that they see nothing of value in her.

If we were to seek to right the ship, and thus to prevent the ruination, it would mean uniting behind a force that was worthy, and which was capable of holding a nation together. Few are such forces. When America was greatest, and indeed when Europe was at its peak, the shared values of the culture were those of Christianity. It’s when we didn’t use the term “Western Civilization”, but rather, Christendom. In American culture, it’s when prayer in schools wasn’t even a controversy, and the exponential growth of the country was unprecedented. It was common to attribute American success to the idea that the country itself had been blessed by God.

Increasingly, America is becoming a God-less country. Certainly, self-identified Christians still dominate, but that’s only true if you use self-identification as the metric. A famous preacher once asked, “If you were arrested for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”

If one were to apply that metric to the nation itself or to the bulk of its citizens, the answer becomes more tepid. It’s a nation that lacks the fortitude to require medical care for the children who survived their own abortions (See the contemptuous history of the Born Alive Protection Act), and which fails to protect its young against the degeneracies of gay pride parades, out of a misplaced idealism of tolerance above decency.

While America stands strong when compared with the now fallen nations of Europe, it is following the same path. When European nations abandoned God and appealed to the transient target of whatever passes for the “reason” of the generation, it gave up the central idea that the individual man has value in and of himself, and crucially, that he is therefore granted certain rights by virtue of his personhood alone. It is hereafter that the allure of collectivism became a new godhead. Any attempt to correct America’s direction must have basis in the truth that without the Christian faith, all nations fall.