*This article was originally published by RealClear Religion.
King Solomon longed to glorify God. Centuries before his reign, the Israelites were bound as slaves in Egypt, yet Yahweh freed them and led the twelve tribes to the Promised Land despite consistent human frailty. But more personally, the Lord blessed his family, elevating his father, David — a shepherd boy from Bethlehem — as Israel’s king. In this role, David unified the Israelites into one formidable nation, not easily trifled with by surrounding countries.
A master of building, Solomon ordered the construction of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to house the Ark of the Covenant (which contained the Ten Commandments, Aaron’s rod, and manna that fed the Israelites), thereby becoming the sole consecrated place of worship in Judaism. The Temple was the heart of the Jewish faith. In Second Chronicles, after the project’s completion, God was pleased with the king saying, “Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayer that is made in this place,” adding, “For now I have chosen and consecrated this house that my name may be there forever; my eyes and my heart will be there for all time.”
Yet in this glorious, momentous encounter, God warns Solomon that if the Israelites “turn aside and forsake my statutes and my commandments which I have set before you, and go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will pluck you up from the land which I have given you; and this house, which I have consecrated for my name, I will cast out of my sight, and will make it a proverb and a byword among all peoples.”
However, even Solomon, known as a wise man and given this sacred insight, faltered in his faith toward life’s end for “his wives [which were more than 1,000] turned away his heart after other gods,” even so far as building pagan altars. Angered, God told him, “I will surely tear the kingdom from you and will give it to your servant”; but even in Solomon’s blatant disobedience, God rejects full destruction, remembering His covenant, saying, “I will not tear away all the kingdom; but I will give one tribe to your son, for the sake of David my servant and for the sake of Jerusalem which I have chosen.”
God’s word comes to pass. When Solomon died around 930 B.C., the Jewish people descended into civil war and splintered into two kingdoms: the north, Israel, and the south, Judah. Solomon’s pursuit of massive wealth accumulation, rampant promiscuity, and sacrifices to pagan gods, not only dulled his spirituality but crippled Israel’s strength culturally and geopolitically. The nation’s fortitude derived from it being united. But worship of God and Israel’s identity were inextricably linked; however, God will continue being for eternity; Israel, on the other hand, cannot — and could not — survive without Him.
This is exhibited during the reigns of subsequent kings, most of whom “did evil in the sight of the Lord,” including building unsanctioned high altars and even worshipping pagan gods. Some kings like Ahaz and Manasseh even sacrificed their own sons. In essence, both kingdoms forgot how to worship properly, thus forgetting God’s laws given in Leviticus and Deuteronomy after the flight from Pharaoh and his charioteers. Worship of God sustained them in Egypt; in the desert for 40 years; and when warding off enemy forces. In short, worship united them more so than language, economics, land or loyalty to kings.
Throughout the Old Testament, prophets warned the Jewish people to recommit themselves, lest they face the consequences and invasion of neighboring empires, Assyria and Babylon. As Isaiah says:
“Truly, you have forgotten the God of your salvation, and have not remembered the Rock of your refuge; therefore, though you plant pleasant plants and set out slips of an alien god, though you make them grow on the day that you plant them, and make them blossom in the morning that you sow; yet the harvest will flee away in a day of grief and incurable pain.”
The prophet Ezekiel, speaking to Judah between 623 and 571 B.C., foretold God’s rightful retribution if the people — who had engaged in false worship — refused to humbly seek forgiveness and make amends with Him:
“Your altars shall become desolate, and your incense altars shall be broken; and I will cast down your slain before idols. And I will lay the dead bodies of the people of Israel before their idols; and I will scatter your bones round about your altars.”
Around 730 B.C., the “incurable pain” arrived: the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom, killing and scattering ten tribes of Israel, now known as the “lost tribes.” Nearly two hundred years later, in 597 B.C., the Babylonians laid siege to the southern kingdom, and destroyed the Temple, which Solomon built, ten years into the invasion.
The Jews endured much anguish from both warring nations; and the southern kingdom’s people also suffered through mass deportations and a 70-year exile from their homeland. Eventually, after conquering the Babylonians, Cyrus the Great granted permission to the Israelites to return. (This act and, indeed, Cyrus were also foretold in The Book of the Prophet Isaiah.)
Solomon’s misjudgments demonstrate how sin is not personal — but has significant, catastrophic consequences for those within our proximity, or even throughout the ages. The schism between Israel and Judah nearly extinguished the Judaic civilization. As Jesus Christ affirms centuries later, “a house divided cannot stand.” Moreover, a nation that forgets its tenets — the ideals that undergirded its morality, legal system, governmental structure, and even economics — is doomed to collapse.
By God’s mercy, Judah survived; therefore, Christ — the Word incarnate — entered into the world, died by crucifixion, and rose from the dead on the third day. A new covenant, religion, and Church were forged between Creator and Man. In time, Christianity imbued itself into every facet of Western Civilization. As historian Tom Holland explains in his book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World:
“To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions. This is no less true for Jews or Muslims than it is for Catholics and Protestants. Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable — indeed the inescapable — influence of Christianity. Whether it be the conviction that the workings of conscience are the surest determinants of good law, or that Church and state exist as distinct entities, or that polygamy is unacceptable, its trace elements are to be found everywhere in the West. Even to write about it in a Western language is to use words shot thought with Christian connotations. …All, though they derive from the classical past, come freighted with the legacy of Christendom. Fail to appreciate this, and the risk is always of anachronism. The West, increasingly empty though the pews may be, remains firmly moored to its Christian past.”
Holland himself is agnostic but admits he was formed by and is sympathetic toward a Christian moral ethos, much like the U.S. Founding Fathers, even though many were arguably deists — a view that God, though real, is wildly uninvolved in human affairs. Yet God was not barred from the Pennsylvania State House where both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were debated. The oft-quoted John Adams revealed this truth when he said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Likewise, Bishop Robert Barron, founder of Word on Fire, posits, “There is a very tight correlation between the claims made by Thomas Jefferson, which are the foundations of our liberal democracy, and the claims of religion.”
In short, despite a multitude of “factions” in U.S. politics, as James Madison noted in the Federalist Papers No. 10, every American citizen must subscribe to a truth: that all men are created equal, and have inalienable rights given to them by a Creator, not government. Moral relativism, therefore, cannot exist in the American system if the nation is to thrive and withstand trials and tribulations. To endure, citizens must believe in those principles, lest we perish. In fact, the nation nearly collapsed during the Civil War when southern states believed slavery — a direct assault on inalienable rights — was morally justifiable.
Yet America is a pluralistic country. Not everyone must be Christian to be an American — but every citizen must recognize the nation’s philosophical heritage is formed by Christ’s teachings. In this way, the United States is the “Great Melting Pot” or, more aptly, embodies the motto “E Pluribus Unum”: out of many, one. We are only one people by holding to the truths enshrined in the Declaration and Constitution, which, again, cannot be divorced from Judeo-Christian tradition.
But what happens when religiosity fades in a country unified by a creed, the nuclear family, and local communities?
Present-day America is increasingly more irreligious. According to an August 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 42% of American adults say religion is very important in their lives, which is below the 102-place median of 55%. Similarly, nearly 45% of Americans say they pray daily, which falls shy of the 102-place median of 46%. In the same vein, a March 2024 Gallup poll found that only three in 10 U.S. adults attend religious services regularly; meanwhile, while 68% of Americans identify as Christians, historically, this affiliation has dropped from 91% in 1948. Conversely, the rise of “nones” — or non-affiliated citizens — has jumped from 8% in 2000 to 22% in 2023.
Additionally, a vast majority of Americans (80%) realize religion’s role is “shrinking,” but 49% believe that “this is a bad thing,” as Pew discovered earlier this year.
Yet the decline is a more recent, rapid phenomenon. In 2000, 86% of Americans’ religious preferences aligned with Christianity. This twenty-point drop-off, in a 20-plus year span, occurs nowhere else in Gallup’s findings. What happened at the turn of the 21st century? Certainly the clerical sexual abuse — uncovered by The Boston Globe in 2002 — ignited the apostasy; however, there is an argument that the horrendous scandal was not the root cause, but the result of decades of poor catechesis. In Christian Smith’s Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (2005), he argues that “religion is widely practiced and positively valued by teens, but also de-prioritized and very poorly understood by them,” coining the phrase Moral Therapeutic Deism (MTD). MTD can be summarized into five points, according to author Rod Dreher:
A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
Good people go to heaven when they die.
One of the more blatant examples of poor catechesis was revealed in a 2019 Pew Survey that found just one-third of U.S. Catholics believed in transubstantiation: that the Eucharist becomes the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ. This doctrine is central in the Catholic Church. In response, this past summer, the National Eucharistic Revival — a grassroots movement to re-catechize U.S. Catholics on the Real Presence — organized pilgrimages across the country that led to the 10th National Eucharistic Congress at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. More than 50,000 people attended.
Nevertheless, a large portion of the blame for this lapse in religiosity can be directed at Christians for not living in an orthodox manner or failing to impart the faith’s wisdom to the next generation.
This has a direct impact on the American social fabric in terms of civil engagement and love of neighbor. Faith in American institutions is at near historic lows, with 16% of Americans telling Pew that they trusted the government just about always or most of the time. Meanwhile, political polarization has rapidly increased, with Pew stating, “Republicans and Democrats view not just the opposing party but also the people in that party in a negative light.” Even military recruitment has endured hardships. Who will serve a country without understanding what it values?
But more troubling are the long-standing issues related to marriage/divorce and fertility rates. In the Christian worldview, marriage is a sacrament where God unites man and woman “in such a way that, by forming ‘one flesh,’ they can transmit human life,” and therefore “cooperate in a unique way in the Creator’s work,” according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Marriage and childrearing are linked. The sacrifice of one destroys the other.
Without a shared understanding of the “summum bonum” (or the highest good), that being love of neighbor more than oneself, it stews spiritual anemia and moral relativism, transforming an “E Pluribus Unum” country into a Dionysian, Hellenistic society: that the greatest good is pursuing earthly pleasure and the accumulation of wealth. Good is undefined — so good is in the eye of the beholder. This is not so different from Solomon in ancient Israel. Or in American society today. Materialism and obsession with sex and/or gender dominate the various media landscapes.
But Dionysus is a pagan god of a pagan religion — and as the Paris 2024 Olympics’ opening ceremony showcased, the Greek god has returned, all while blaspheming the Last Supper.
He is not the only one. In Commentary Magazine, Liel Leibovitz shares that witchcraft, Wicca and Norse mythology are making a comeback, writing:
In 1990, scholars from Trinity College set out to learn just how many of their fellow Americans practiced some form of pagan religion. The numbers were unsurprisingly small: about 8,000, or enough to pack your average Journey reunion concert. But the researchers asked again in 2008, and this time, 340,000 Americans said yes to paganism. A decade later, the Pew survey posed the same question, and, if it is to believed, there are now about 1.5 million Americans professing an array of pagan persuasions, from Wicca to the Viking lore, making paganism one of the nation’s fastest-growing persuasions.
As the Catechism emphasizes, human beings’ “desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God,” adding, “Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for.” In short, mankind is happiest worshiping God — which takes form not only in the pew on Sunday but in charitable service to neighbor and community. But man can also worship idols as demonstrated time and time again in the Old Testament, such as the Golden calf during the Book of Exodus.
Why is there this rise in 21st-century paganism? Interestingly, Holland’s own life offers insights that “The [initial] defeat of paganism had ushered in the reign of Nobodaddy, and of all the various crusaders, inquisitors and black-hatted Puritans who had served as his acolytes. Colour and excitement had been drained from the world.” Coupled with the rise of the New Atheism movement in the late 20th century, more than four in ten U.S. millennials do not know, believe or care if God exists. God is equated to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny: figments of imagination to make sure children behave.
Yet, as MTD asserts, people still consider themselves spiritual, but not religious. However, everyone is religious — it just depends on what or to whom we worship. The rise in paganism, however, is a troubling trend, as highlighted in John Daniel Davidson’s book Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. He writes:
“America was founded not just on certain ideals but on a certain kind of people, a predominantly Christian people, and it depends for its survival on their moral virtue, without which the entire experiment in self-government will unravel. As Christianity fades in America, so too will our system of government, our civil society, and all our rights and freedoms. Without a national culture shaped by Christian faith, without a majority consensus in favor of traditional Christian morality, America as we know it will come to an end. Instead of free citizens in a republic, we will be slaves in a pagan empire. …Western civilization and its accoutrements depend on Christianity, not just in the abstract but in practice. …That source is the Christian faith, in the absence of which we will revert to an older form of civilization, one in which power alone matters and the weak and the vulnerable count for nothing.”
The high altars are returning. This should not be taken lightly because it is not harmless to one’s soul or society at-large. The Catechism warns that any practice of magic or sorcery, even “for the sake of restoring their health — are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion.” But this generation is inculcating paganistic tendencies to alarming degrees, such that, on the environmental front, 36% of teens and young adults are hesitant to have children due to climate change. Protecting Mother Earth has supplanted the perpetuation of human existence. Meanwhile, lawmakers are promoting costly and freedom-restricting policies that will hardly reduce global emissions; and at the same time spark a new imperialism, exploiting weaker nations, to obtain resources like cobalt for electric vehicle car batteries (which utilizes child-labor).
This is not to say the environment should be treated callously. Quite the contrary. The Catechism explains that “God entrusted the earth and its resources to the common stewardship of mankind to take care of them, master them by labor, and enjoy their fruits. The goods of creation are destined for the whole human race.” Mankind is not a blight, a vermin on natural resources as perpetuated by Malthusian advocates; earth is meant for man. It is incumbent on humanity to treat the environment with dignity, but not to extinguish itself sacrificially, as with the worrisome rise in abortions (last year was the highest level in more than a decade).
In the Old Testament, the Canaanites made human sacrifices to the gods, Amalek and Moloch. In the pre-Judeo society, there was little to no respect for the individual — at least those not in the ruling class — let alone human rights. Man is not a noble savage. As Andrew Doran writes in the European Conservative:
“Most will agree that civilized behavior, at a minimum, consists of abstaining from ritualistic torture, rape, sexual mutilation, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and related conduct. Yet for most of human history such conduct was normative and often sacralized. Habits of ritual violence and scapegoating to satisfy blood lust and communal anxiety were ubiquitous.”
Civilization, as we know it, came from the Judeo-Christian faith. Therefore, expunging God from society will not breed — and has not bred — a happier existence, particularly for those living on the margins. In fact, according to a Harvard University study published in October 2023, 36% of young adults are more anxious compared to 18% of teens; and 29% of young adults suffer from depression compared to 15% of teens. Yet the New York Times reported that “Just one-third of respondents ages 12 to 17 said things were going well for children and teenagers today….Less than half said they thought they would be better off than their parents when they grew up — a downbeat view shared among teenagers in many rich countries, other data shows.”
Indeed, numerous societal forces are contributing to the state of this anxious nation, including, but not limited to, politics, inflation, social media, the media, education, chronic debt, lack of parental involvement, environmental issues, and more. Furthermore, Christians could argue Our Lady of Fatima’s prediction that the “final battle” would be over marriage and the family is more relevant than ever to our era’s woes. But the troubles of the age can mostly be simplified into two key elements: the lack of cohesive understanding of what the truth is and hyper-individualism, taking the “pursuit of happiness” to its extremes.
The individual does not exist in isolation. And while inner peace is certainly an admirable desire to achieve (which can only be found in communion with God), it should not be at the expense or violation of another person’s rights or the whole. This collapse in a collective understanding of American principles, both privately and in the public square, had led us astray from what made the United States a formidable nation in the first place, and even attractive to millions upon millions of immigrants over the centuries.
In truth, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah were compromised internally long before outside forces exploited and conquered them. Is America poised for such a fate? Many have postulated as such, but this belief of an American in decline is not only a right-leaning inclination; the New York Times, The Atlantic, and America Magazine have also published warning signals. Like the Assyrians and Babylonians a few millennia before, nefarious world powers — like Russia, China, and Iran — are certainly ready to pounce on the United States’ economic, geopolitical, and cultural misfortunes.
Yet all is not dire. The decline can be reversed — but it begins with a rejection of paganism in all forms; reinvigorating the nuclear family, meritocracy, and intermediary civil organizations; and a re-examination of American principles that are rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is imperative for a unified understanding of what these rights mean and where they came from. Christians must also remember their baptism when they were anointed priest, prophet, and king. With those words, comes a sacred duty: to be an example of joyous devotion, willing the good of the other, especially in times of suffering and anguish.
Even in their disobedience, God did not abandon His chosen people. Instead, He offered them a vision of a redemptive, restorative future, particularly from the prophet Micah, who lived in Judah before the southern kingdom’s fall:
“It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised up above the hills; and peoples shall flow to it, and many nations shall come, and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and we may walk in his paths.’”
As the ancient prophets professed, so remains true today: hold onto God and His everlasting hope. Abandon paganism. Take heed of His commandments. Practice good worship. For in the end, to chart a new course in American history and prevent decline — or even an exile reminiscent of the Israelites — we must remember Christ’s sacrificial message: to love one another.