A note to the reader before you begin.
What follows is not a policy paper. It is not a political manifesto. It is a prophetic appeal to the my fellow evangelical Christians, teetering on holding onto Sola Scriptura and written by a 67-year-old born-again Christian who has walked with Jesus since 1977. I am not claiming direct revelation. I am claiming pattern recognition: the kind that comes from nearly five decades of following Christ, raising a family, running businesses, and serving as a Senior Legislative Assistant to two conservative Republican Congressmen during the Reagan Administration. I have been inside the political machinery. I know how it works. And I have come to believe that the crisis facing America is not fundamentally political. Not even financial, though it could be soon. It is spiritual. If you read this looking for a platform, you will be disappointed. If you read it looking for an honest diagnosis and a call to repentance, I believe you will find it.
*********************************************************************************
Beneath financial dominance lie deeper layers that sustain it.
At the top of the pyramid is what we might call financial stability. In the modern world this includes things like the strength of the dollar, the depth of U.S. capital markets, and the global trust placed in American institutions.
Beneath that lies economic competence: fiscal policy, infrastructure, inflation control, capital mobility, and productive markets.
But the base of the pyramid, the layer that ultimately determines whether the entire structure stands or falls, is something more basic.
Civilizational health.
Faith. Properly ordered Family. Moral integrity. Transcendent Moral Education. Work ethic. Cultural cohesion.
Remove that foundation and the upper layers eventually collapse.
This is not a political claim. It is a historical one. And it is a problem we face today – no social cohesion.
The Biblical Pattern: Culture Precedes Prosperity
The Old Testament repeatedly demonstrates a simple pattern.
When Israel honored God’s covenant, stability followed. Agricultural abundance followed. Security followed.
When Israel abandoned the covenant, corruption appeared first, then economic instability, then national humiliation.
The order never reversed.
Prosperity was always the fruit of moral order, not the cause of it.
God did not bless a corrupt culture with long-term stability.
America Once Understood This
For much of American history, from the founding through roughly the early 1960s, the United States possessed a level of cultural cohesion that is difficult to imagine today.
It would be dishonest to portray that era as purely Protestant or purely Christian. Secular Enlightenment ideas were present from the beginning, and some of the darkest moral failures in our history, most notably slavery and the hard and soft forms of racism that followed, and now abortion exposed deep contradictions between what many Americans professed and how they actually lived.
Those sins needed to be confronted and resolved biblically through repentance, confession, and moral reformation. Instead, the constitutional system attempted to resolve them primarily through legal mechanisms. The Constitution, by design, possesses no theological category for repentance. Article VI (no religious test) makes it clear there would be no Christian foundation for the Constitution. It was designed to only legislate, adjudicate, and enforce. When confronted with moral failure, the system does what legal systems do. It sees a nail and reaches for a hammer.
Yet even with these failures, a broadly shared civilizational ethic still existed across much of the country. That ethic was shaped heavily by the Protestant Christian worldview that had formed the early American culture, though it was also reinforced by Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and others who shared many of the same moral assumptions.
Across denominational differences, there remained a widely recognized moral framework rooted in Christian teaching. That framework emphasized personal responsibility, family stability, moral accountability before God, hard work, and delayed gratification. In many ways these values reflected a lived expression of sola scriptura, even when not perfectly practiced.
Because that shared ethic existed, Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians could live and work together within a common moral horizon. They disagreed theologically, but they largely agreed about the moral shape of public life.
Where moral cohesion exists, stability tends to follow
Those cultural norms created something incredibly powerful: trust.
Trust lowers transaction costs. Trust allows contracts to function. Trust allows capital to move freely.
Because of that trust, the United States became the greatest destination for global capital the world has ever seen.
Foreign investment, savings, and capital accumulation flowed into American markets because the institutional framework resting on that cultural foundation appeared stable and trustworthy.
I know this personally. I grew up in that era.
But prosperity has a strange side effect.
It can make people lazy.
Prosperity Made Us Less Careful
Beginning in the 1970s, something subtle but profound changed.
Consumer credit markets expanded dramatically.
Credit cards became widespread. Borrowing became normalized. Consumption became easier than discipline.
Christians were not immune. I certainly was not.
We began living beyond our means because easy credit allowed it.
Credit itself is not inherently evil. Like food, property, and wealth, it must be governed by wisdom.
But wisdom requires something many evangelical Christians quietly abandoned.
Sola Scriptura.
Instead of asking what God’s Word teaches about stewardship, debt, responsibility, and discipline, many of us simply adopted the habits of the culture around us.
Meanwhile, the culture itself was changing rapidly.
Institutional Transformation
Beginning in the 1960s, American institutions experienced a profound ideological shift.
Universities, bureaucracies, media organizations, and cultural institutions increasingly embraced frameworks that emphasized grievance politics, bureaucratic redistribution, moral relativism, and identity-based conflict.
This shift was reinforced through several major structural developments. It is important to distinguish these developments from the moral questions they involved, because the legislation itself often addressed genuine injustice while simultaneously accelerating institutional dynamics that would later be exploited for very different purposes.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 addressed undeniable moral failures in American society and helped dismantle legal segregation. Equal justice under law was both necessary and right. But the legislation also expanded federal institutional power in ways that would later be redirected toward purposes far beyond the original intent of securing civil rights.
The Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 fundamentally altered American demographic patterns without a clear public discussion of long-term cultural consequences.
Then Roe v. Wade legalized the destruction of unborn life on a massive scale, demonstrating that the constitutional system contained no fixed moral center capable of protecting the most vulnerable.
All of this unfolded while many Christians were making a critical intellectual mistake.
The Rise of Constitutional Idolatry
Faced with cultural chaos, many Christians turned to politics for stability.
That instinct was understandable. And it was a HUGE mistake.
But instead of critically examining the political structure itself, many began to elevate it.
The Constitution slowly became something close to sacred.
The Framers became something close to apostles.
This was a catastrophic intellectual mistake.
Because the Constitution is not a Christian document.
It is an Enlightenment framework deliberately constructed without a defined moral identity.
That moral neutrality created several structural weaknesses.
First, majority rule ultimately determines which moral framework governs public life. Any ethic, including a Marxist ethic can gain control.
Second, the Constitution provides no shared civilizational ethic capable of guiding moral disputes.
Third, judicial supremacy allows courts to reinterpret moral questions without meaningful structural limits.
Finally, the amendment process is so difficult that structural correction becomes nearly impossible once institutional capture occurs.
These features make the system extremely vulnerable to ideological manipulation.
Those who wished to reshape American culture eventually learned to exploit these weaknesses.
Many Christians did not. We resigned ourselves to “voting, hoping and then coping” while losing ground year, by year, by year.
When Foundations Crack
When a society loses its shared moral foundation, the economic and financial layers built on top of that foundation eventually weaken.
Trust erodes. Handshake deals disappear. “My word is my bond” becomes just another idiom tied to another era.
Fiscal discipline disappears.
Political conflict becomes institutional warfare.
Eventually even financial dominance begins to fracture.
The pyramid begins to crack.
A Pattern Worth Observing
Sola Scripture helps us here because Scripture reveals a sobering historical pattern.
When a people who know God gradually abandon His moral order, decline rarely arrives overnight.
Compromise spreads slowly through institutions, culture, and leadership until the moral foundation of the nation weakens beyond repair.
Eventually judgment arrives, sometimes through internal collapse, sometimes through external domination.
Israel experienced this pattern through the Babylonian captivity. That captivity did not occur because of a single event but because generations of compromise accumulated until the nation could no longer sustain itself.
America is not ancient Israel. We are not a covenant nation in the same sense.
I am not making a prophetic claim about America’s future.
But patterns in history deserve attention.
Rome collapsed after abandoning the moral framework that sustained its early republic.
Large portions of Europe drifted into cultural decline after abandoning Christianity as the moral center of their civilization.
Civilizations rarely collapse purely from economic failure. They collapse when moral cohesion disintegrates.
If a nation that once claimed allegiance to God increasingly embraces anti-God ideologies, celebrates covenant-breaking decadence, and elevates human authority above divine authority, it should not be surprised if the blessings that once sustained it begin to fade.
History has revealed this pattern many times.
The Trap Christians Fell Into
Part of the reason Christians failed to resist this cultural erosion lies in a theological mistake.
Eschatology.
Some Christians adopted fatalism. Everything is getting worse anyway, so why try.
Others embraced utopian optimism, believing human political effort could usher in the Kingdom of God.
Both positions miss the biblical emphasis.
Scripture calls believers to stewardship.
If God entrusts something to you, you are responsible for how you manage it.
And God entrusted the United States with extraordinary blessings.
The question is simple.
Did we steward them well? With 75,000,000 Constitutionally murdered babies lying at the doorstep of the church, the evidence is quite clear, right?
The Church Fell Asleep
While cultural institutions were transforming, much of the Protestant evangelical church drifted into something resembling spiritual sedation.
Weekly gatherings increasingly resembled entertainment.
Sermons became motivational speeches.
Therapeutic messaging overtook pulpits.
Jesus became a genie in a lantern you rub and He will give you health and wealth.
Serious theological thinking became rare.
Just when the nation needed a generation of deeply thoughtful Christians, very few were prepared. And most remain unprepared even at this late hour.
The largest peaceful army in the country fell asleep.
The Path Forward Begins With Repentance
Repairing the foundation cannot begin with policy proposals.
It must begin with repentance.
First, Christians must admit we took intellectual shortcuts. We embraced fatalism or unrealistic optimism instead of biblical stewardship.
Second, we must repent for abandoning the discipline of Sola Scriptura and replacing it with something far weaker.
Constitutional nationalism.
But the constitutional system did not prevent the moral catastrophe of abortion.
Under its framework millions of unborn children were legally destroyed. Babies created in His image, while we raise hands on Sunday and sing how great is our God.
The prophets of Israel repeatedly warned that religious worship without moral repentance is offensive to God. The clearest example appears in Amos.
Speaking to a prosperous but morally corrupt Israel, God said:
“I hate, I despise your feasts… take away from me the noise of your songs.” (Amos 5:21–23)
This is stunning language. The festivals, sacrifices, and songs Amos describes were not pagan rituals. They were the very worship practices God Himself had commanded. Yet God rejected them.
Why?
Because the people who sang these songs and offered these sacrifices had built a society that oppressed the weak and corrupted justice.
God’s answer was simple:
“Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24)
The problem was not that Israel worshiped too much. The problem was that they worshiped without repentance.
It is difficult to read Amos without asking an uncomfortable question.
What would God say about a nation where churches are filled on Sunday morning, hands raised in worship, while on Monday thousands of innocent children are legally killed?
The prophets would not be impressed by our music.
They would ask about our repentance.
Until Christians acknowledge that sin honestly, we should not expect God to bless any reform movement. And repentance is ALWAYS found in some change of behavior based on changed thinking, i.e. adopting Sola Scriptura. In other words, we obey God by being honest about what the Constitution is and what it isn’t. And it is NOT a Christian document. It is thoroughly Enlightenment creation.
Otherwise, as Peter writes, judgment begins with the house of God.
What Must Eventually Change
Only after repentance can serious thinking begin.
The current constitutional framework does not provide a mechanism for restoring a shared Christian moral ethic.
That reality must eventually be confronted. We can no longer sit by and hope.
I will not pretend to have a detailed blueprint for what replaces or reforms the current structure. I have ideas. But that kind of clarity belongs to a Church that has first done the hard work of repentance – as I have done personally. I know my contribution to the decline of a Christian ethic in this country. And I have repented as more of it becomes clear to me.
What I can say is this: the trajectory of that conversation must eventually include whether the Constitution can be reformed, or whether it must be replaced with a framework that openly acknowledges the moral foundations necessary for a stable civilization. That is a question the Church must be willing to ask and then lead on, even if the answers take an uncomfortable uncertainty.
Immigration policy illustrates the kind of thinking that will be required going forward.
The Old Testament concept of the sojourner provides a helpful starting point. Translating that concept into a modern pluralistic society, however, has proven nearly impossible. The reason is simple. We are no longer a coherent society shaped by a shared Christian ethic. Instead, we are governed primarily by constitutional law, constantly influenced by shifting political power and special interests.
But the biblical idea of the sojourner still deserves serious consideration.
In ancient Israel, the ger (the resident alien) was welcomed within the community, but that welcome came with expectations. The sojourner lived under the moral law of the covenant community. He was protected by that law, but he was also accountable to it. His presence was permitted, but he was not free to subvert the moral order that sustained the society.
That principle is worth examining carefully. A nation has the right, and perhaps even the obligation, to expect that those who enter its borders will honor the moral framework that sustains it.
The Window Is Closing
Even now the United States retains enormous advantages.
Its capital markets remain the deepest in the world.
Its legal system still commands global trust.
But those advantages rest on a cultural foundation that is visibly eroding.
If that foundation collapses, the financial structure built upon it will eventually follow.
The United States will no longer remain the least bad destination for global capital.
But It Is Not Too Late
History does not move in straight lines.
Nations have recovered from decline before.
America could still return to the moral seriousness that once defined it.
Not through nostalgia.
Through repentance.
Through stewardship.
Through a renewed commitment to the authority of Scripture over every area of life.
Including public life.
The pyramid can be strengthened again.
But only if Christians are willing to rebuild the foundation.
And that begins with repentance. Will you join me?
Don’t forget, 3,000 babies will be murdered tomorrow because of our Enlightenment constitutional order I once supported. I have blood on my hands.