It doesn’t require a prophet’s vision to see that America is doomed.
What does it take to build an empire and keep it together? The empire must have an identity that makes the conquering forces proud. That identity must bring a sense of empowerment that protects from the threats of our human existence. It has to work for some plurality citizens that forms a majority-in-effect, so that they continue to support and enable the conquest, or hold the line when not expanding. It must be something that stirs the ego so that people coming into the empire assimilate enough to participate.
It’s not that people can’t hold multiple identities, but the empire or nation has to be the one that doesn’t fade or fail in daily life. It has to fire sufficiently loyalty to keep things running to the same end. Anything that corrupts that identity will bear the seeds of collapse.
But that kind of identity is fungible; anything will do as long as it works. It is possible to build a type of identity that is much closer to the soul of the individuals. This can vary between ethnic and cultural identity, but is typically some of both. Keep in mind that religion is synonymous with culture in practice. The two overlap so much it’s hard to distinguish in terms of effects. It has to be something that soaks into your sense of who you are, not just what you are.
Empires have sensed this, even if it wasn’t understood consciously. They have tried to inculcate a religious fervor into their sense of identity. The problem is that it can’t be done effectively if it ignores certain truths of human nature. Any attempt to impose a religious sense of duty through external pressure is bound to fail. There is a human soul and this is where it shows must clearly. Imperial or national leadership that rests on a doctrine of mere coercion will always fail in due time. A purely materialistic philosophy guarantees failure; it imparts no sense of destiny.
People have to believe they want what the religion offers. It must appeal to some higher sense of duty, something that makes it feel honorable. It has to define honor in terms that are more than mere compliance. It can’t be faked for very long. This is the ultimate failure of most communist regimes: They are inherently materialistic and shallow. Only when it was combined with a sense of ultimate moral duty as a question of one’s existence has it worked very well. It has to stand pretty much on its own; some core element of the society must desire what it is and what it does. If it does not inspire, if it is not worth dying for, then it will have a short life.
Despite the secular philosophy of America’s founders, it was the ostensible Western Christian identity of the populace that gave the US its national unity. The leaders consciously took advantage of that sense of duty and purpose and built an empire. Somewhere along the way, this fervor was gutted. There arose a secular minded force that sought to hijack the sense of duty, but took away the religion. It has succeeded only half-way. They now appear to hold the moral high ground, but there is nothing to keep them together except their hatred for those who don’t join them.
This is why the Social Justice movement is in such deep trouble. They consider their agenda manifestly the ultimate truth. For them, there can be no possible contrary argument. Those who resist are considered insane, mentally ill and incapable of doing good. But this same hatred is then turned on each other with alarming frequency. The only unifying factor is the external threat, and when that sense of threat wanes, they attack each other.
Identity politics is so shallow as to die on its own in the second generation. That’s what we see today. Having done their best to stomp out the religious moral identity from which they stole the veneer of moral probity, there is nothing left to keep their “nation” together. And this loss of a higher moral consciousness that fires loyalty and identity has infected the whole national fabric. This dispersal of identity into fractured groups of the perpetually aggrieved has destroyed the only thing worth having in the game of politics in the first place. There can be no human infrastructure for enforcing their agenda. There will be no nation left to win.
This is in part why the sense of human identity currently rests most strongly on the virtual world. There is at least some sense of predictability and cohesion in the virtual realm. It’s hard to predict the cultural attributes that will arise from this drift of human consciousness into the virtual, but it’s not hard to see it going there.
This is what we are dealing with as we seek to restore the ancient covenant identity established in the Bible. This is the setting in which it must grow. Particularly this early in the game, our connection via the Internet is about all we have. It looks to be a long lag time before any kind of real-world communities form on the basis of our proposed covenant identity.
Let us pray and contemplate how to exploit this situation for the glory of Christ.
