Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., himself an ordained pastor, also reflected on faith and paid homage to the Creator God in his “I have a dream” speech when he stated:
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted… and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.…With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day—
His appeal to faith and to the glory of the Lord was surely deliberate. He knew that faith made black heritage rich in a way that transcended the material segregationist world. Throughout this new era of black oppression, it was the one area in which black Americans had white Americans beat.
During a more recent conversation with my grandfather, I asked him why it was that his children, my father included, wound up leading lives so outside of the framework that he and my grandmother provided. My grandparents lived like puritans. They never swore, never drank alcohol, and never missed religious services. And while certainly not meant as a condemnation, I was interested in the fact that their offspring had all been through divorces, were less religious, and were plenty open to partying and celebration. Was it simply a desire to live as they hadn’t been permitted to in their youth?
My grandfather shot back an answer that rather startled me.
“It was the hippies. They ruined everything.”
The hippies. The 1960s movement that rejected the mainstream, conventional way of living. They would come to be remembered as the “dropouts of society” who followed the tenets of love, drugs, and rock and roll. My grandfather’s answer was interesting because the late sixties also saw a shift in the attitude of black Americans. The pacifist culture of Dr. King became obsolete. A louder, more aggressive movement was beginning to take shape with the concept of “black power” at its core. Shelby Steele, in his book White Guilt, described the shifting sentiment:
For King’s generation of leaders, racism was a barrier in the path to black freedom, and the goal was to remove it. But for this new generation of black leaders, racism existed within a context of white guilt.… By the mid-sixties, white guilt was eliciting an entirely new kind of black leadership, not selfless men like King… but smaller men, bargainers, bluffers, haranguers—not moralists but specialists—who could set up a trade with white guilt… racism suddenly became valuable to the people who had long suffered it.
Steele, himself a part of the angry black youth at that time, goes on to detail their political meetings, where blacks would repeat Marxist phrases such as “raise your consciousness.” It was this quiet Marxist entry into black America that, as he posits, became “a precursor to the now common argument that racism is systemic, structural, and institutional.” It is interesting that he underscores Marxism as providing the basis for their beliefs, although he, like many others, was unaware of it at the time. The genealogy of this mentality is, in my opinion, the single most important truth for black Americans to know; our modern ideas of oppression were fathered by communism.
Karl Marx, the German philosopher and socialist revolutionary behind the Marxist doctrine, is the father of communism. Many people today attempt to draw differences between communism and socialism—there are none. Karl Marx was the socialist revolutionary (see: Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) who coauthored the infamous Communist Manifesto, a political treatise on how a society ought to implement socialism. Socialism is the theory, and communism its implementation. Similarly, free markets is the theory, capitalism its implementation. Any individual who believes in free markets will openly identify as a capitalist, but you would be hard-pressed to find a socialist who will admit they are a communist. That’s because, as discussed in chapter 5, it is homicidal. Author Ayn Rand best asserts this when she writes, “There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism—by vote.” In other words, when a free society first votes in communism, that is socialism. It is certainly strange that the faithful black community would have become mixed up in Marx’s theories, especially since Marx famously described religion as the “sigh of the oppressed creature… the opium of the people.” His belief that religion ought to be repressed inspired the murderous reigns of Russian leader Vladimir Lenin and Chinese leader Mao Zedong, who mandated statewide atheism. Within the Soviet Union, this meant that the government sponsored a program to convert people to atheism. Religious property was confiscated, and believers were harassed and publicly ridiculed. And yet, unwittingly, faithful black Americans in the mid-sixties would begin uttering the philosophies from the communist man who instigated these offenses.
Similarly, when Fidel Castro led a Marxist revolution in Cuba to become its dictator, he banned religious celebrations, shut down more than four hundred Catholic schools, confiscated religious property, and jailed and expelled Catholic priests before declaring Cuba an atheist state. After the socialists voted Castro into power—suicide—he reigned as a communist dictator until his death in 2016.
It is clear that those who wish to assume dictatorial control of a state use socialism as their conduit to power, but why is the removal of faith necessary? Why did Karl Marx and the communist leaders who came after him deem it essential to destroy the pillar of faith?
And why was this ideology brought to black America?
“Raise your consciousness,” blacks were told, in an effort to recognize that racism and inequality are, in fact, everywhere. Karl Marx wanted his working-class followers to realize the totality of their oppression. He wanted them to universalize it and to view it as everlasting.
And that is exactly what black Americans started to do.
The brilliance of socialist doctrine is its understanding that full state control can arise from a working-class revolution. Smarter men, in the pursuit of power, recognized that a class of angry citizens could be manipulated to overthrow any government, and would likely elect the leader of their frustrations to assume full control in their revolution’s wake. A good socialist leader must appeal to the emotions of the masses. He must justify their anger to the point of moblike riots for revolution.
And moblike riots are exactly what black Americans began to initiate.
The mid-sixties saw urban race riots all across the United States. Bloodshed, burning, and looting became commonplace. The result? Black economic depression for decades to come in cities that once flourished. It turns out chasing “racist” business owners out of the city yields unemployment and created the desolate, impoverished inner-city conditions that we see today.
What is noteworthy, however, is that these riots took place after black Americans had been given equal rights to white Americans—not before, when reasons for rioting would have been much more obvious.
In essence, black Americans were certainly not becoming more oppressed but were instead being transformed into pawns for smarter men in the pursuit of power.
THE GOD OF GOVERNMENT
Today, we are seeing a rebirth of Marx’s socialist agenda and with it, the routine mocking of those who practice faith. Fundamental to the Left’s hatred of faith is the fact that Christianity preaches the doctrine of the Original Sin. Christians therefore know that humanity is not perfectible, because the Bible teaches that we are all “fallen” from Adam and Eve. Their original disobedience of God’s word sets up the subsequent and continuing rebellious nature of mankind. It is for this reason that Jesus says to his disciples in Matthew 24, “See that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying ‘I am the Christ,’ and they will lead many astray. And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars.… For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are but the beginning of the birth pains.�
�� It is a reminder to followers of Christ that until the coming of the eternal world, humanity will always be under the curse of sin.
Socialism, of course, cannot survive if this is the commonly held belief, because they teach that faith in government is the conduit to a perfect society. The quicker the spread of atheism, then, the quicker the spread of government as the solution to our every problem.
Black America outstrips the rest of the United States when it comes to faith, still. According to a Pew study (“U.S. Religious Landscape Study,” 2014), black Americans are both far more convinced of their faith and take their faith in God more seriously than both white and Hispanic America. In a stark contrast, black Americans say they believe in God with absolute certainty by a margin of 24 percent versus Hispanics and 22 percent versus whites. This is perhaps the reason that in America we have, rather unusually, a church that is named after a particular racial group. The “black church,” as it is known, is an alien concept to most other societies. While there are certainly churches that cater to particularly ethnic or linguistic groups, it is out of the deep spiritual heritage that emerged from the Civil War and the era of segregation that black churches were born and continue to this day, well into the era beyond civil rights and racial inequality.
Yet, undeniably, the Left is gaining some territory. If we look at the trend of Christian faith, there are a few stark warning signs that the Left’s mission is having some success:
In a 2019 Gallup poll, 25 percent of participants, when asked “How important is religion in your own life?,” answered “not important,” up from 12 percent in 2000. In the same poll, the number of those who say they have no faith has almost tripled, and those professing specific Christian faith have dropped from 82 percent to 67 percent. Separately, in a Pew Research study, church attendance on a monthly basis is being replaced by a few times a year or less. People who answered “yes” to church attendance monthly or more went from 54 percent in 2007 to 45 percent in 2019, while those who attended simply a few times a year had the exact opposite number trend over that same twelve-year time frame.
When it comes to the black church, the same theme is observable. Again, Pew Research conducted a study that showed that between 2007 and 2014, black Americans’ attendance at church dropped from 53 percent to 47 percent in the “at least once a week” category, while simple “belief in God” dropped from 88 percent to 83 percent. These numbers are not staggering drops, but over a seven-year period they do betray a continuation of the same theme: God is on the decline in America.
These points drive home a hard truth for all of America, both black and white: we are losing the base of our Christian value system. In the space of less than twenty years the Christian fabric that has underpinned our Western civilization for centuries has been picked apart at the seams by faithlessness.
As I suggested earlier, people do not simply lose faith—they replace it. The Left is trying to replace and transform faith. And they wish to separate black Americans from their faith in God in an effort to replace it with a faith in government and the Left’s pursuit of “moral goodness.” It is a model that espouses altruism and the inherent goodness of all involved, and includes no room for the truth regarding our fallibility.
Perhaps most revealing is the study of religious trends. In a Gallup poll conducted between 1998 and 2000 versus 2016–18, one of the fastest subgroups to leave church was determined to be those who held a Democrat Party ID. In 1998–2000, 71 percent of Democrats attended church, compared with only a 48 percent attendance record in 2016–18, a drop of 23 percent, which was greater than any other age, education, marital status, gender, or regional subgroup.
As America pushes forward into the twenty-first century, the threat to faith within our national community has never been greater. The growing trend of secularization threatens the very documents that gave our country birth.
In 2019, at the San Francisco meeting of the Democratic National Committee, the Democrats adopted a resolution (unanimously) that stated the following:
WHEREAS, religiously unaffiliated Americans overwhelmingly share the Democratic Party’s values, with 70% voting for Democrats in 2018, 80% supporting same-sex marriage, and 61% saying immigrants make American society stronger; and
WHEREAS, the religiously unaffiliated demographic represents the largest religious group within the Democratic Party, growing from 19% in 2007 to one in three today; and
WHEREAS, the nonreligious have often been subjected to unfair bias and exclusion in American society, particularly in the areas of politics and policymaking where assumptions of religiosity have long predominated…
The resolution goes on to state that the DNC recognizes “[t]hat religiously unaffiliated Americans are a group that, as much as any other, advocates for rational public policy based on sound science and universal humanistic values and should be represented, included, and heard by the Party.”
There are two things that immediately jump out at me from the above resolution. The first is that increasingly the Democrats align themselves with the secular, and the second is that they are pushing for “universal humanistic values.” On the first, it is alarming that one of the two major political parties of this country, which was built upon the truths of God and whose founding document states that God has endowed humanity with “certain unalienable Rights” as well as lauding Him as “the Supreme Judge of the world,” should choose to both commend and move increasingly to embrace secular trends that are not in keeping with the original founding of the nation. Second, and arguably more alarming, is that they wish to transfer “universal humanistic values” into the moral conversation, but the age-old question of relativism then simply creeps back in: Who decides what these humanistic values are? The problem that all societies have found is that in seeking to replace eternal theological values, they can replace them only with material values that change over time. Thus begins the argument, why shouldn’t the Constitution be changed every generation so that it can be updated to reflect the latest version of morality? We have already seen, in discussing the media, that the moral values of each generation change—imagine what this would mean for Americans if we removed the God-given values and aspirations that our Founders built into the documents that gave birth to this land?
The continued assault on faith by the Left was also evident when the words “So help me God” were removed from many of the swearing-in ceremonies of Democrat-controlled congressional committees in the aftermath of the 2018 midterms. Steve Cohen, a long-standing Democrat congressman from Tennessee, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “I think God belongs in religious institutions: in temple, in church, in cathedral, in mosque—but not in Congress” and “God doesn’t want to be used,” the latter comment obviously betraying the direct line that Cohen has to the Almighty.
Small changes such as these are just the beginning of the walk to secularism that will eventually lead to a radical full-scale disposal of God within our society. It is no longer politically expedient for the Left to seek God, so they don’t; look at any socialist society, as mentioned in earlier chapters, and you will see that atheism is the name of the game.
JUDGMENT DAY
So where does this leave the conversation on faith? Well, quite simply, the Left wishes to drive a wedge between people and God in the same way that it has successfully driven a wedge between individuals and family. The Left understands that in order to grow government to a state of omnipotence, there must be nowhere else that its citizens place value and faith.
I have mentioned many times over that we cannot perfect humanity, but it is here, in a discussion about faith, that my earlier assertions find their true context. Because underpinning most of what drives the liberal agenda in America is the fundamental belief that there is a greater ideology than “all men are created equal,” and that is the leftist belief that “all men are perfectible.” They are driven, not just in America—but also further abroad, by this dishonest and impossible promise to
the people.
And paradoxically, in their mission to destroy faith, they demand the same. They want faith in their vision, their principles, their ideals. Ultimately it is a vision born of arrogant pride. What the Left holds above all else is faith in themselves. Astoundingly, it is a desire to elevate the mind of man into the position of God. However, the expression “don’t play God” is popular for a reason. Because doing so never works.
The Bible talks extensively about the pride of man, often citing it as one of the greatest sins against God. The Left’s unholy alliance with godlessness and their desire for secularism will undoubtedly bring about disaster. Proud societies, arrogant societies, societies with a belief in the things of this world and without a belief in God, are those marked by God’s wrath.
“For the LORD of hosts has a day against all that is proud and lofty, against all that is lifted up—and it shall be brought low” (Isaiah 2:12).
“Proud societies will be marked with strife: ‘Where there is strife, there is pride’ ” (Proverbs 13:10).
I believe that at the very core of the national debate surrounding the future of our country lies the question of faith. And I believe most of the determination will be set by black America, and whether we remain steadfast to the only beliefs that have seen us through the many hardships we have faced.
Paul writes in the Letter to the Galatians that it is “for freedom that Christ has set us free… do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” How prudent these words are for black Americans as we are being encouraged to replace God with government. The great biblical narrative of a fallen mankind and Christ redeeming that fallen state finds unique homage within the black community. First, we had slavery; second, we had the era of Jim Crow; and now, third time unlucky, we have Democrats entrancing us to their gods of welfare, poverty, and despair. We have found ourselves, yet again, in need of salvation.
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