VIEWPOINT with Chuck Crismier
PAGAN AMERICA
This is viewpoint with attorney and author Chuck Chris Meyer. Viewpoint is a one hour talk show confronting the issues of America's heart and home. And now with today's edition of Viewpoint here is Chuck Chris Meyer. There's a 12 and a half mile river that jumps off of the James River, the birth river of America, and it's called the Pagan River. Some might call it the Pagan River, it's the Pagan River. How it got its name we don't know. But here's the point. The point is there might be a 12 and a half mile river called the Pagan River flowing off the James River. But in reality, there is a Pagan River flowing through the entire nation of America. America is rapidly flowing Pagan. If you were to take the opportunity to go and Google the question, is America a Pagan nation? Here's what you might find in part. There are now more Americans who deny church membership than claimant. We are officially a Pagan nation. Another put bluntly, America is becoming Pagan. Again, Pagan America is dressed in Christianity. Many evangelicals are busy trying to reconcile this false religion with the true Christian faith, but they can't be reconciled. According to the Pew Research Center, the fastest growing region in North America is WICCA, a nature-based religion. Since America is just another secular nation, it should not surprise us when our country follows the same whims and desires of fallen man. And again, Paganism embraces Christianity not because it's true because it consolidates the nation and discourages dissent. All of that by Googling is America Pagan. So I ask you the question today, is America Pagan? Well, that might bring up the next question is, is or was America a Christian nation? That usually is the question that is being asked, is America a Christian nation? Well, depending on how you look at it, and we've discussed it so many times here on viewpoint, the answer is both yes and no. Historically, and by heritage yes, by practice today, probably not. So today on viewpoint, we're going to discuss this issue of whether or not America is a Pagan nation. Our guest today says that a coin of Christianity is spelling a dark age to come in this country. And if it comes in this country, what will happen to the rest of the world? Since Abraham Lincoln said that America was the last best hope of earth. All that here today on viewpoint, I'm glad that you've joined us. It's conversation with ever-increasing conviction. Talk that transforms including today. So what do you make of the fact that in 2000, actually it was 1995, George Gallup appeared before the Christian publishing industry in Dallas, Texas. And in his speech, he said, Americans still revere the Bible. We just don't read it. So in other words, we revere it in theory, but we just don't believe it. We don't act upon it. Maybe we're becoming more pagan than we ever thought. Our guest today, John Daniel Davidson, with his book Pagan America, the decline of Christianity and the dark age to come. John, it's so good to have you on the program. This is a powerful book, much needed and a much needed discussion. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. And where are you located, my friend? I live in Alaska. Is that right? That's right. I lived in Texas for many years, but I grew up in Alaska and recently moved back up here. Well, that's interesting. And Alaska isn't exactly known historically as a Christian outlier in North America, is it? It's pretty Christian, pretty conservative, at least in the area of the state where I live. Not necessarily a staunchly read state or republican state, but largely a lot of really active churches in Alaska. Well, we've got a lot of so-called really active churches all over the country. I spent 30 years in Southern California. In fact, as a trial attorney for 20 years, I also was a volunteer pastor in one of the fastest-growing churches there in Southern California for eight years and spoke all over the state, translating principles to the kingdom of God from a businessman and lawyer's position and viewpoint. But California is kind of a mixed bag. If you look at the government, it's profoundly unchristian. If you look at the number of churches, you would say, well, maybe California is a Christian state. How do we understand the difference between whether something is Christian and whether it's pagan? Well, the premise of the book is really that there is only one alternative to Christianity. It's certainly from a civilizational standpoint. And that alternative is not secular, liberal, humanism, atheistic, humanism. The alternative to Christianity is paganism. And I argue that as paganism, Christianity declines in America as it recedes from public life. Paganism in new forms, in modern forms, in post-Christian forms, is coming back to dominate American culture in society. And we see that in so many different ways today, not just in our government structures, but just in our culture and in this sort of social structures of society. Well, I couldn't agree with you more. And that's one of the reasons why I felt that the Lord called me to leave the practice of law in 1992, saying, "Brother, you've been pleading the cause of men long enough. I want you to plead my cause of the land as a voice to the church declaring vision for the nation in America's greatest crisis hour." And we've been on the air here for 29 years. We're now in our 30th year confronting the deepest issues of America's home from God's eternal perspective. And what we deal with continually is this assault upon Christian belief, even in God's own house. And that's true either for Protestants or Catholics. It's everywhere. It seems to me. Yes, it is. And one of the things that you can see over the course of the last several decades, but really over the course of the last 70 or 80 years, is not just a decline in practice among Americans of Christian practice. Right. Church members. But we're also beginning to see a decline in the quality of Christian belief. Exactly. A corruption of Christian theology across many different denominations. This began really in the 1970s and 80s with the mainline Protestant churches sort of giving into progressive liberalism and compromising with sort of leftist ideology. And now we're starting to see it in evangelical churches. We've seen a real decline in the quality of catechism among Catholics. And these are all finds that America is really entering a post-Christian era. And we've never been in a post-Christian era before. Well, it's kind of frightening, isn't it? Yes, absolutely. It's a novel situation and it's unprecedented because America was, of course, founded with a predominantly Christian people and a majoritarian Christian culture. And those things were reflected in our very form of government, not to mention, you know, the other way in society for most of our history. That's true. In fact, it was John Adams. Our second president has said our government was made for a moral and Christian people and is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. So, indeed, that's why our Constitution is failing in its authority. That's why because the Bible has failed in its authority. We are increasingly becoming pagan. We'll talk more about the depths of that when we get back. So he tuned my friends, John David, Daniel Davidson, our guest today. Once upon a time, children could pray and read their Bibles in school. Divorces were practically unknown as was child abuse. In our once great America, virginity and chastity were popular virtues and homosexuality was an abomination. So what happened in just one generation? Hi, I'm Chuck Chris Myers. I urge you to join me daily on Viewpoint, where we discuss the most challenging issues, touching our hearts and homes. Could America's moral slide relate to the fourth commandment? Listen to Viewpoint on this radio station or any time at saveus.org. Welcome back to Viewpoint. I'm Chuck Chris Myers. Pagan America. That's what we're talking about today, asking the question, "Have we gone pagan?" Well, if you think back to, excuse me, April 5, 1993, it was perhaps one of the most astounding covers ever in the history of Time Magazine. On the front cover was a cross. In the lower right-hand corner were these words. America has lost God. I wasn't talking about the America that was going to lose God. It was talking about the America that already had abandoned God. You open the magazine to the church search, the major article, talking about how Americans were flooding back to church after Gulf War I because of a kind of unique patriotism that came upon the country then because of fear. And they concluded, "This is Time Magazine, a liberal magazine that's become ever more liberal sense and pagan to the root." And they said this, "Americans have walked away from God and have created a new God in their own image." In other words, the God that we used to serve was no longer the God that we did serve. That, my friends, was the very year we formed Save America Ministries as a voice to the church declaring vision for the nation to rebuild the foundations of faith and freedom. That's where we've been, certainly since 1992, when the same magazine in Newsweek said, "How the American Dream Unraveled." It's all been unraveling, and we've seen it since 1992. John, as you take a look at this in your book, I think that unfortunately we the people, not just our political leaders, but even more so, even our spiritual leaders, have been blind to what has been happening and basically have tried to do a little dance with the culture so severe that we've actually become the culture. What say you? Yeah, I agree with that. I think it's especially notable how you see this rhetoric today, and it's amazing to me that you still see it among some Christian leaders, discouraging Christians from engaging in sort of the culture wars and encouraging them instead to be nice and winsome. And winsomeness is supposed to be the watchword of the day for good Christians rather than standing up for the truth. Well, the other way to put it is if you can't beat them, join them. Yeah, exactly. The problem with that, of course, is that joining them means lying about the truth of the Christian faith. And I don't know where this idea came from, but it's more loving to lie to someone than to tell the truth, but that's what it comes down to. And a lot of Christian leaders in America today basically are making that argument. And it couldn't be more wrong. And it's gotten us into a lot of trouble. And that's what we talked about earlier, the decline and equality of Christian faith along with the quantity of Christian believers. Right. These are really the hallmarks of this post-Christian era that I'm talking about and the rise of a neo-pagan spirituality, a neo-pagan religious sensibility among the American people. It was long thought that the future of America was the secularism, the atheistic, cold, rationalist, materialist worldview, but that's proven not to be the case. Everywhere you look, people may still invoke belief in the science. They still may invoke secular humanism, but in practice, they believe in spirituality. They believe in spirits. They believe in the supernatural. Well, that's why the fastest growing religion in America is called Wicca. That's right. There are more and more adherence there. And I don't even mean, when I say pagan America, I don't mean that we're going to see a sudden surge in temples to Zeus and Apollo in Times Square, but we are starting to see a resurging interest in witchcraft, in Wicca, in other forms of pagan worship, but we're also seeing the pagan ethos. And the pagan ethos is really just a rejection of transcendent moral truth or transcendent reality and the replacing of that with a radical subjectivity, a subjective and relativistic worldview. If you as a Roman Catholic seeing that come directly from the Pope and the Vatican. No, not at all. Pope Francis has been very staunch, most recently condemning transgenderism, transgender ideology. He's been very staunch, condemning abortion. Well, he's been very open about receiving homosexuality, receiving divorce, remarriage, not doing anything to resist any of those trends. It's almost like he's trying to accommodate to the pagan world. That's all I see. Well, I think that maybe you have your facts wrong about what the Vatican has done and what the Vatican has said in recent years for all of the hand-bringing about how Pope Francis is a liberal. He hasn't changed any church teaching or church doctrine. And in fact, he's repudiated the sort of liberal wing of the German bishops that are trying to push this stuff, he's sort of slapped back at them and slapped them down. Why has Bishop Vignano in a number of the other bishops come out and radically challenged him saying that he is the voice of liberalism in the name of Catholicism? Because they want him to be more clear and forceful in his condemnation to these things. Look, I'm no Francis apologist, so he throws a lot of confusion and he does the church and the faithful disservice by not speaking clearly about a lot of these things. But I think the character of him that you see in the mainstream media as this sort of liberal who's changing church doctrine is really the misrepresentation of the reality and maybe some of the nuances within the internal conflicts within the Catholic Church. A lot of the conflicts I described in the book, in the Protestant Church that we've seen play out over the past 60 years, are also present in the Catholic Church. And there's a tug of war going on just like we saw all of the mainline Protestant churches in the 70s and 90s. So it's both in the Catholic Church and in the Protestant Church. And if you were to go back to Pasadena, California, where I spent 20 years practicing law in nine years before that teaching public school, you would find the beginning of a movement in this country called the Church Growth Movement. It was a radical change in the view of what it meant to be a Christian and what it meant to go to church and be the church and so on. During the Church Growth Movement, the whole idea started by Dr. Robert Schuller was to make people feel good and feel comfortable. So you had to seduce people into the churches in order to make them feel good to grow your church. Well, by the 1980s, mid-1980s, that was deemed insufficient. And that metastasized into what was known as the Secret Sensitive Movement, which was defining deviancy down, reducing the claims of Christ to a bare, bare, bare, bare minimum so that you need only make a confession and you could live pretty much as you would. Thereby, you could seduce even more people into our churches. The problem with that is that even as you say in your book, the mainline churches actually dropped out of that because they were so embracing of a new paganism, a neo-paganism, that they even participate in the Church Growth Movement. Yeah, it's hard to see how mainline churches like the Episcopal Church USA or the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America are even properly understood Christian at this point. They really are sort of Gnostic cults that espouse the kind of self-religion or a nihilistic self-worship. And really, they accept the premise of the pagan ethos, which is, again, that radical moral relativity and subjectivity and rejection of transcendent truth and really transcendent reality itself. And you see this sort of attempt, as you described there, this movement in the '90s to sort of boil Christianity down to the lowest common denominator in order to get the most number of people in. What it ends up doing is disfiguring Christian doctrine and introducing heresy and really transforming the Christian faith into a kind of Gnosticism. Or neo-paganism. Or neo-paganism, of course, because it eventually doesn't work, right, because people leave. People just, they just reject these churches outright, which is why you see collapse in attendance of mainline Protestant churches over the past 40 years. That's why you've seen the radical growth in independent churches that were not associated with denominations because they said, "You know what? We can't endure this kind of thinking. We just can't endure it." But even there, the influences have become so great. I grew up at the church. My father was a pastor for 50 years. I've pastored myself for 35 years, even while practicing law, John, and I've seen it. I know the church like the back of my hand, not the Catholic Church, but the Protestant Church at every level. And I agree with your assessment, we are rapidly on a pagan decline. Friends, the book is a $30 book, a hardbound $30 book, hot off the press. It's yours for $27 on our website, saveus.org. That's saveus.org. You can call us at 1-800-SAVE USA, 1-800-SAVE USA, or write to us at Save America Ministries. P. O. Mach 7 0 8 7 9. Richmond, Virginia, 23255, you're writing a check at $5 for postage and handling. This is a book well, well, well worth. You're getting and digesting because our friend here, our new friend to this program, John Davidson is really going after this issue. The mere fact that he has written a book with the title, "Pagan America," tells you there's something very serious going on. So John, I have a question for you. Do you have children? Yes, I do. How many children? I prefer not to discuss my family on any media programs. Oh, okay. Well, the reason I'm asking you, whether you have... It's part of a professional hazard for me in being in media. Okay, okay. Well, the reason I ask is not to try to expose you to anything, but rather to ask you some probing questions concerning your own kids. I don't know what age they are, apparently you're not willing to talk about that either, but do you sense in their lives that they have been assimilating into a pagan or neo-pagan viewpoint in their own lives? Well, I can speak generally and from a personal perspective too, and what I've seen in my own family, and what I've seen in the family of friends and neighbors and relatives. And that is that the children whose parents send them to public schools and sort of just raise them largely in the way that I was raised in the '90s, entrusting their kids to the mainstream institutions of secular society, those kids are indoctrinated into a post-Christian pagan ethos because every institution in our society has sort of adopted this post-Christian, really anti-Christian worldview and cosmology, that's such that you can't trust the public schools the way that you did in even 30 years ago, 25 years ago. I agree with you wholeheartedly. But those families that don't send their kids to the public schools, who don't embrace mainstream institutions and really instead build up alternative parallel institutions, whether it's homeschool, private or religious schools, and really get involved in their church communities and build a thick religious community around their families, those kids are thriving and doing very well, and they are really more conservative than I am. And they're going to be fine, they're going to be fine because they've been protected from the corruption of our mainstream institutions, and I think that's something that all parents really need to think about hard, they need to think about their families and how they might need to change their lives in really radical ways to protect their kids from the pagan culture. Well that's why we homeschooled our three daughters, and four of our ten grandchildren were homeschooled, and less people should think that somehow it alienates you from socialization and from success, the oldest of those is now in his third year of residency as a doctor. The one just under that has been a nurse for six years, and two of them just graduated from engineering school this last Friday. So homeschooling, and we just did a program concerning the matter of homeschooling, and I think it's something that people should seriously consider. I think that's what you're suggesting as well. Yeah, not just homeschooling, homeschooling is necessary, but it may also be necessary for people to think about moving to a different city or a different state, radically changing their lives, having about a day home and be a homemaker. Well spoken my friend, well spoken, wow you're actually stern in the pond here my friend. John Davidson, the book, "Pega America the Decline and Christianity in the Dark Age to Come." We'll be right back friends. There is so much more about Chuck Chris Myer and Save America Ministries. On our website, SaveUS.org. For example, under the marriage section, God has marriage on his mind. Chuck has some great resources to strengthen your marriage. First off, a fact sheet on the state of the marital union, a fact sheet on the state of ministry, marriage and morals, SaveUS.org. Marriage divorce and remarriage. What does the Bible really teach about this? Find all of this at SaveUS.org. Also, a letter to pastors, the Hosea project, SaveUS.org. And many more resources to strengthen your marriage. It's all on Chuck's website, SaveUS.org. Again, you can listen to Chuck's viewpoint broadcast live and archive, Save America Ministries website at SaveUS.org. Our guest today is the senior editor of the Federalist and we want to find out from him exactly what that means. The Federalist harks back to the Federalist Papers. John, what is the Federalist all about? Tell us. Well, the Federalist was a publication that was founded 11 years ago as a write-a-center magazine of political and cultural commentary and reporting. And as I said, we're not a very old paper or magazine, but we have been around for a little while and we really were founded as an alternative to more stayed and comfortable sources of news on the right, like National Review and the Now Defunct Weekly Standard. There was a need for a voice, a countercultural voice to come in and do something more than just be what amounts to controlled opposition, which is what a lot of write-a-center media is about these days. Well, I appreciate what you guys have done. We hear about you fairly regularly. We hear from your co-worker, Molly Hemingway. She's kind of at the top of the heap there, isn't she? Yeah. She's our editor-in-chief and very well-known personality on Fox News and she's doing great work and leading a great organization. Not only that, but a sweet lady, I think. Absolutely. And I've always appreciated whenever I've heard her speak. It's good to hear you speak as well, John. How do you distinguish your role there at the Federalist from hers other than by a name? Sure. I'm one of a handful of senior editors and, you know, we all kind of focus on different areas of reporting. For many years, I was focused, because I lived in Texas, focused on reporting on the US-Mexico border and I've been to Mexico many times and to the border many times, reporting on that issue, which, you know, when I started reporting on it, it wasn't a major issue, but it has become a major issue, like a lot of things that weren't big problems 10 years ago, but now here we are in 2024 and we've got major problems with the border. We have major problems with trans-ideology. We have major problems with the collapse of the family. And those are all issues that we really hone in on at the Federalist and try to dig into why these things are happening and explained for our readers how to think about it and where to go for more information, but we also -- this is a big difference between Federalist and a lot of other right-of-center publications. We don't view our job as telling everybody out in America what they should think based on what people on the right in Washington think. We want people in Washington to know what the rest of America thinks, and so a lot of our focus is on criticizing leadership in Washington and helping them to understand how disconnected they are from ordinary Americans. Well I agree with that, and I'm so glad that you're occupying that space in our culture today and in the communication channels. Your book, "Pake in America," really caught my attention. It takes a certain amount of, shall we say, putspa to come out with a book called "Pagan America," the decline of Christianity and the dark age to come because it goes against what people want to think about who we are and what we are. And one of the things that I've been dealing with for a very long time, being up to my eyeballs in the broader Christian community from coast to coast, having been head chairman of the National Day of Affairs Task Force in Virginia for four years, and realizing the struggle that we have even within Christendom, if we want to use that term, the broader professing Christian community, we're finding, I'm finding, that the resistance level is rather profound and palpable even within our churches, even from pastors. They're just very reluctant to deal with issues in the reality that they really are. So it's kind of business as usual, make the people feel good, feed them some more pablum, as long as you can keep their mouth full of pablum, everything will be good, at least for you. Yeah, it's very disappointing and I struggle to understand why that would be a pastor's response to the state of the culture, it doesn't take a genius to look out on our culture and see that we are rapidly decrystionizing and that the implications of that are profound for all Christians. Exactly. And I'm not talking about mainline churches now, I'm talking about so-called evangelical and fundamentalist churches. Yeah, absolutely, and there's major controversies and major debates going on within the Southern Baptist. Absolutely. Within big evangelical mega churches that are sort of going soft on gay marriage and homosexuality and these different things. And it's all in an effort to sort of accommodate the mainstream post-Christian culture. And the argument I make in the book is that that culture cannot be accommodated, Christians that are never going to be able to accommodate enough to be left alone by the new pagan ideology. And if you do attempt to, you will be absorbed by it and completely lose your identity in Christ. Yes, exactly. And eventually you'll lose your congregations as well as we have seen with the mainline. People will just stop going to church because why go here at church, what you can hear in the mainstream culture, 24/7, everywhere you go. If the church adopts the values, the post-Christian values of the pagan mainstream, there's no point in going to church anymore. And so the only place that we really see life, and this is true in the Protestant churches and in Catholic churches as well, the only place that we see growth in life is in the orthodox congregations and groups of believers who are sticking to the faith, who are unapologetic about it and who really live it out day to day in community. I myself for a long time in Texas went to a Latin mass parish and it was full of young families and children. It was the best attended mass at the parish I went to. And it is the fastest growing part of the Catholic church in America are people who attend Latin mass. These are orthodox. So in other words, you've got to speak Roman. There are no Catholics. You've got to speak Roman. No, you don't have to speak Roman. What I'm saying is that you don't even have to speak Latin, but this is true in Protestant churches too. The most conservative, most traditional forms and expressions of Christianity are the ones that are growing right now. Everything else is dying and declining. And so it's only the church of the future in America is going to be one that's smaller but more faithful and more potent. Well, believe it or not, this may sound a little interesting to you, John, but we've had a house church for 30 years now. And one of the reasons we have had this, and we have people gathering from over a 90-mile diameter area, a house church, why do they come? Because they're looking for two things. One clear, unadulterated truth that's reality and applied Christianity, not churchy-ality, Christianity. Second, they're looking for real Christian fellowship. And so we provide both of those. We even have a men's gathering. It's been gathering now for 28 years, once a month, and people come again from a 90-mile diameter area from different churches. Why? Because they're looking for exactly the same thing. Yeah, there's a real hunger for it out there. I mean, people are starving. The culture that we have now is bleak. America is a bleak place in a lot of ways. These points of light shine all the brighter in the midst of the gathering darkness. And this is something that Protestant and Catholic leaders that were prescient and really who had an understanding of what was happening to the culture were saying back in the 60s and 70s that the church was going to shrink. It was going to lose a lot of privileges and deference that it had in the past. All the respectability that you might have had being publicly Christian is going to go away. And it seems to me that as paganism creeps in upon us, persecution is going to follow on its heels and already is. Absolutely. And not just the persecution of sort of poetry, but actual state persecution. And we are already starting to take shape in the way that the Department of Justice and the FBI have targeted conservative Christians, pro-life protesters. Oh, yeah. We have a dear friend of this congregation and of this ministry who has been part of the 11 that were arrested there, I think it was Tennessee and facing judgment this very month. So yeah, we're looking at this is the expression of neo-paganism in our country, in our world. It's very serious. And what you did not know, John, is that my 11th book just went to type set last week. Here's the title, "When Persecution Comes, Preparing Hearts for Perilous Times." You think that's on tap right now? You think that's important right now? Absolutely. I think Christians need to wrap their minds around the fact that it's coming back in a way that we haven't known in this kind, but it is not unfamiliar to the historical for many things executed. And when that came to an end, I think we've lost sight of the fact that that was the experience of generations and generations of Christians that can't say, even in the face of persecution and we need to wrap our minds around the fact that that's coming back now. This is that time and because of that, as I went through your book, John, I became aware that our hearts were going to be in sync on that issue and so I want to send you a copy of the manuscript for your feedback. Can I do that? Absolutely. I'd love that. All right. So I'm going to have you somehow give me your email so that I can send it to you. I know you don't want to give it to me openly here on the broadcast, but I do want to get it from you maybe immediately after the program. Okay. Now, friends, the book is Pagan America, the decline of Christianity, the dark age to come. We don't like to think of the dark age to come, but when you start thinking about how persecution is coming, when you see it happening from the state level, you see it happening within the culture, friends, I'm telling you, this is no friend to grace anymore, as they say. We're living in a state of disgrace. We're dissing the era of grace and God's grace is extended only to those who obey Him, and that's what the Bible says. So the more pagan we go, the more persecution we're going to get, and that's darkness. Get a copy of this wonderful book, hardbound book. It's a $30 book. Yours for $27 on our website. Save us.org. Give us a call at 1-800-SAVE USA, right to us at Save American Industries, and $5 for supposed to be happening. Why has there not been even a 1% gain among followers of Christ in the last 25 years? Would it be that God is seeking to restore 1st century Christianity for the 21st century? Jesus said, "I'll build my church." Is Christ by His spirit stirring to prepare the church for the 21st century? The early church prayed together and broke bread from house to house. They were family, and it was said by all who observed, "Behold how they love one another." Incredible. But the same can be found right now. Go to save us.org and click sell church. We can revive 1st century Christianity for the 21st century. It's about people, not programs, it's about a body, not a building. That's save us dot o-r-g. Click sell church. In 1630, there was a godly attorney by the name of John Winthrop that brought over four boatloads of Puritans for the express purpose of living out the Christian faith in a way that had never been done in so-called Christian Europe, had not been done in so-called Christian England, had not been done even in Israel. He wrote before they landed what some historians have called the most important and clearest expression of the American vision ever penned. Let me just read a few sentences, a couple of paragraphs from that to set the stage for the rest of our conversation here. Here's what he said, "Thus stands the case between God and us." We're entered into covenant with him for this work and we've taken out a commission. But if we neglect to observe these articles, in other words obey his voice and what he's called us to do. And dissembling or playing games pretense with our God shall embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out and wrath against us and be revenged of such a perjured people and he will make us to know the price of the breach of such a covenant. Now, the only way for us to avoid shipwreck, he said, is to provide our posterity to follow the Council of Micah, to do justly to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God. And for this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man, we must hold each other in brotherly affection, be willing to rid ourselves of our exorcists to supply others' necessities and we must delight in one another. So shall we keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace and the Lord will be our God in delight to dwell among us as his own people and will bless us in all of our ways. And we'll find that the God of Israel is among us and he will make our name a praise and a glory we must consider we shall be like a city upon a hill. That's where the phrase came from, it did not come from Ronald Reagan, it came from John Winthrop who took it for the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, a city upon a hill. Well, whatever happened to the city upon a hill, John? Yeah, that's a great passage and I discuss that passage and others like it in the book. When I talk about the founding of America, what America really was founded upon. You know, a lot of people misunderstand that phrase, the city on the hill, they think that John Winthrop was saying that what they were doing was going to be an example for the world to follow. That's not really what he meant as that passage that you just read made really clear. What he meant was that they were entering into a covenant with God and if they weren't faithful, their project, their enterprise would not succeed, they would fail. They were trying to establish a society that they thought was just and that allowed them to worship God in the way that they thought was fast. And was a maximum expression of New Testament Christianity. That's really what they had in mind. Here's what he said in warning, what would happen if we don't do this? If we deal falsely with our God in this work and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, in other words, become pagans, we shall be made a story and a by word throughout the world and we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil in the ways of God and all believers in God and we should shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we are forced out of the new land where we are going. Sounds often not like the subtitle of your book, The Decline of Christianity of the Dark Age to Come, John. Yes, exactly and the key thing, I think, to understand about that passage is that what these early pilgrims, these early arrivals from Europe to the New World, what they understood themselves to be doing was establishing a specifically Christian society, specifically Christian polity and that is how they understood what they are doing and that I argue is what the founders understood they were doing when they formed the United States. They had formed the federal government to govern over and knit together states and localities and local communities that were explicitly Christian. That's why they did not have to mention God in the Constitution because it had already been the foundation for 170 years in the country. Yeah, exactly, and it was understood by all of them that the principles on which the United States was founded, right, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, those were principles that were derived from the Christian religion and that could not exist and cannot exist outside or cut off from the Christian faith that gave birth to them. All of the founders understood that. And you mentioned John Adams and his famous line, but many of the other founders, including George Washington, said very similar things all throughout that era. In fact, we actually have on our gallery wall here, the most incredible calligraphy is hard to explain how absolutely gorgeous this is, George Washington's Prayer for America, his final prayer for America, and one cannot read it without realizing that where his heart was as expressing the heart of his countrymen. And shortly thereafter, in the early 1800s, another fellow by the name of Robert Winthrop made this statement, "We will either be governed by a power within in our hearts or by a power without government, either by the Bible or by the bayonet." And he was so right. And the more we have abandoned the authority of the Bible, we have seen the encroachment of government, the mighty hand of government restricting freedom and imposing Godlessness on the country, haven't we? That's right. And this is a really important point that I want to bring up today that I talk about in the book, pagan societies are based on force and coercion. That's why all pagan cultures, especially the ones that got more advanced, the most advanced pagan societies, all took the same form. Give me like Rome? Yes, they were slave empires. That's true of Rome. It was true of the Aztecs. It was true of the Carthaginians. It was true of Greece. It was true of the ancient Mesopotamians. It was true of Egypt. All of the greatest pagan societies were slave empires, and they were ruled on the basis of force, might made right. There was no sense of human dignity or individual rights, anything like that. No sense of the consent of the governed, none of that. There was a ruling class and a slave class, and that's how those societies are structured. And we're going to return to that if we abandon our Christian faith. In fact, what we're seeing is a reiteration of the French Revolution, I fear. Exactly. It is a type of the end times. I believe that we are in those times, that Jesus foretold, that his apostles foretold, and we're seeing all the signs happening right before our eyes. We should not be, shall we say, surprised that these things are happening because, as Jeremiah, the prophet said, the heart of man is desperately wicked. Who could know it? So as we abandon what has been called the great experiment of freedom called the United States of America, actually, it's not so much an experiment. It's what will you do if you follow Christ and what will happen if you don't? Isn't that really what the basis is? Yeah, that's right. And we take for granted, and we make a major error in taking for granted these accoutrements of Western civilization like human rights and freedom of speech and government by consent, thinking that these things exist on their own sort of out in the ether, untethered from theological claims. They rely for their coherence on theological, specifically Christian claims about man and God and how society should be organized. And if you reject the faith from which they come, you will eventually lose those principles and lose that civilizational cohesion, and you'll revert to a pagan form of society, which is just based on force. Exactly. It's happening, and if we go back to our founders, a lot of people argue where some of them were not Christians and they were deists and they were this and they were that. Well, what they did believe is that mankind was fundamentally wicked. His heart was wicked, nobody could know it. And therefore, human beings could not be trusted to mass their authority in democracy. They had to be restrained by some form, and that's what they called a republic, a representative democracy. So the continuing cries for our democracy, our democracy, our democracy are in fact a kind of political cry for the restoration of paganism, I think. Yeah, and the idea behind the republic was that you could have a republic, but you could only have it with a certain kind of people. Exactly. And people themselves had to exercise self-government on themselves through their religion and through their morality. And that's why most of our leaders, our founders, were calling for a virtuous people. If we are not a virtuous people, they said we're doomed. Now, isn't it interesting, John, that Forbes magazine in its 75th anniversary edition that came out in 1992, asked this fundamental question, "Whatever happened to virtue in America?" 1992. Yeah. Well, it was possible to see, even back then, as I'm sure you did and have, that these trends were well underway in the 1990s. In fact, I believe every American today was already born into a post-Christian society. I agree. We're now kind of seeing that come into being in really obvious ways all across these different issues in society that we're debating, all these culture war issues. The broad contours of a post-Christian society are visible now. That's one of the reasons I wrote the book, is to try to help people to see it, that you don't get the culture without the cult. If you get rid of the cult, you lose the culture, and that's what's happening to us right now. There you go. The pagan America, whether the pagan river is called the pagan river, the begone river, paganism has made its way like a flat, fast-flowing river throughout America, throughout the tributaries and the streams of America, even in the church house, whether Protestant or Catholic, it's there, the decline of Christianity, and a darkness that is coming upon the earth. And as the prophet once said, "Gross darkness upon the people," get a copy of this wonderful book, Friends. A hard-band book, hot off the press, pagan America, the decline of Christianity, and the dark age to come, coming from one of the best writers and not authoritarian, not authoritarian, but authorities in our country today, trying to stand for truth, and that there is indeed truth that we can stand upon. John Daniel Davidson, $27, we'll put this $30 book in your hands. It's on our website, saveus.org. Give us a call, 1-800-SAVE-USA, 1-800-SAVE-USA, or write to us at Save America Ministries, PO Box 70879, Richmond, Virginia, 23255, ready to check, add $5 for postage and handling. And John, we need to be reminded, as you do in your book concerning a secular philosopher by the name of Alex Alexis de Tocqueville, who, among other things, not only said America's great because America's good, and America's ever cease to be good with America's cease to be great. But as the foundation for that, he said, "I saw all the great natural resources of this country and all of the tremendous business and all of those things, but it wasn't till I went to the churches of America and heard her pulpits of flame with righteousness that I understood the secret of her genius and power." Maybe that's what we need to do to restore the secret of the genius and power. What's that you? Oh, absolutely. The genius and power of America was in her Christian faith, and without it, we will be sapped of our vitality, we'll lose that which makes us special, and we'll become like every other pagan society that's ever existed on earth, and as we said, that something that's unpleasant to contemplate, but we need to contemplate it. Well, we do. We absolutely do because, ultimately, God judges nations in this time, but he judges us all in the time to come. Think about that, my friends. We may be American's, but ultimately, we have to decide whether we're followers of Jesus Christ. That's the real issue. Which are we following? What's the most important thing? The America that we've known can only exist if you and I are truly obeying Christ. Thanks for joining us. A big thank you to John Davidson. I feel like we become a friend here, co-workers in the kingdom, and I appreciate so much for joining us here, John, with your wonderful book, "Pagan America." Let's become a partner, send your gifts by faith to save America ministries, the Obox 70879 Richmond, Virginia, 23255. Remember, the other guy's not doing God's depending on you. You've been listening to Viewpoint with Chuck Chris Meyer. Viewpoint is supported by the faithful gifts of our listeners. Let me urge you to become a partner with Chuck as a voice to the church, declaring vision for the nation. Join us again next time on Viewpoint as we confront the issues of America's heart and heart. [BLANK_AUDIO]