OPINION: A theory of how modern man divorced himself from God

Currently we are looking head-on at a Yeatsian “Rough Beast / Slouching towards Bethlehem / To be Born,” and our American society is careening, tottering onwards toward moral chaos.

For it is a moral “tsunami” fast moving toward us, even beyond a “tipping point” when we see that Mr. Obama, the most corrupt president we’ve ever had, took oaths to protect the Constitution, the good of the common American people, and the good of the nation, but has trashed all three.

Look back to 1932 for the origins of America’s malaise and moral disintegration in the eyes of its Maker. We find the Lambeth, England Synod, where the always trendy Anglican Church took a referendum on contraception, which ALL Christian religions had forbade as clearly wrong. In fact, Pope Sixtus VI in 1588 had issued a papal bull condemning it as a “capital crime.” But come ’32, the Anglicans authorized it, and soon all other Protestant religions fell into line (but not the Catholic), and thus it became the soup du jour in American families and couples throughout the nation, as “American” as fruit salad or apple pie.

It was a psychic “earthquake” far out to sea that has generated in 84 years a true metastasizing toward our collective attitudes on sex, life, children, marriage, love, and God Himself. So our society little by little inched toward the abyss. First it was in 1973, the infamous Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion on demand in an act by the Supreme Court of raw judicial power. Grievously, this is currently a central “plank” in the Democratic Party, even though since the law was passed, about 59 million babies have been slaughtered in the womb. If we include use of the abortifacient pill, Plan B, RU-486, the diaphragm, and the IUD, which are non-surgical, the number is probably 30 percent higher overall.

This ugly business has generated vast male disrespect toward women by men, who often have their own view of sexuality, and women shaped by ubiquitous pornography. Maybe it goes vice versa as well. Graphic early-age sex ed is foisted on little children as Christian parents helplessly protest. Throughout early adolescence, the message is “Just Do It,” and “Protect Yourself!” for your needs and pleasures are paramount. The result? Babies, especially “unwanted babies” — which are a gift from God — are expendable in a throw-away society. A hyper-sexualized media condones all sorts of “Modern Family” idiocy.

But the “root” of the near century-long “problem” is taking the holy purposes of God out of the nuptial embrace, the fire moving out of the “fireplace” and burning the house down. This activity is sacred, protected by God by no less than three of 10 Commandments, and thus when a society or a religion (putatively “Christian”) severs that connection from its Author, from the nuptial embrace, it rots from the inside. It forgets what children, marriage, and sexuality are for, which is to raise up citizens to what Augustine calls “The City of God.”

But the bitter “fruit” of the universal acceptance of this contraception is abortion on demand, furtive hedonism and narcissism lurking now right out in the open — the tsunami gathering speed, strength and power as it approaches us. “We have met the enemy,” says Pogo, “and he is us.”

The corruption from “root” to “branch” to “fruit” has many ramifications in our society. High suicide rates, even in our last blessed state of Montana — as life is not seen as a gift of God, but for one’s self-gratifying pleasure rather than the First and Sixth Commandments, duty, and virtuous living, and any kind of spiritual authenticity.

Meth, heroin, “spice,” cocaine, LSD, etc. — drug usage is off the charts. Veterans from Mideast wars are killing themselves in despair at astounding suicide rates. There is the manipulative and vicious pickup bar scene, and The Atlantic says that the average college co-ed has 14 “hook ups,” anything from making out to intercourse, in a four-year-career. And when the pill doesn’t work, there’s always an off-campus convenient Planned Parenthood store to remedy the “situation.”

Euthanasia is another coming “bitter fruit.” Canada, California, and three other states, including Montana to some extent, now have a “right to die” law. Similarly, Belgium and Holland originated it into full “flower” in terminating the lives of 14,000 elderly, disabled, or depressed patients with the aid of impatient heirs and complicit doctors betraying their Hippocratic oaths. A dictum of “quality of life” instead of honestly seeing mankind made in the image and likeness of God has superseded the latter, with pagan, disastrous, murderous results.

“You know something’s happenin’ / but you don’t know what it is / do you, / Mr. Jones?” as Bob Dylan sings. For in that last telling, brutal and honest analysis, what we used to abhor, we then tolerated, then embraced, and that is true indeed of the smarmy homosexualist agenda which Mr. Obama champions.

Still, I have no grief with homosexuals. My No. 1 tennis player at Soap Lake High in Washington state was gay, and I liked and respected him. Yet currently, we went from gay-required “civil unions,” to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to full acceptance in the military, “to legal gay marriage,” which is a travesty and a telling of who we existentially, religiously, truly are and how and what we have become, and how we regard not just Scripture’s teachings, but God Himself.

So now if a baker doesn’t want to put a huge phallus on a gay wedding cake, he can be sued and bankrupted. And chaplains in the military will shortly be cashiered out without a pension if they refuse to do gay weddings.

Yes, we’re down the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole, getting socially more and more heedlessly adrift and aloft like a falcon from the falconer, which is Christ. It is time for self-mastery, integrity, and some fierce self-examination of who we are objectively, and what we are becoming as a society at large, whether we enter the breach against the “tsunami” headed toward us — yes, Matilda, there IS a Foe, and he hates you with a malice beyond human articulation — and remember, the Savior says, “They hated me without cause.”

For we in this blessed nation must return to respecting even in our precious sovereign sexual lives the complementarity of the living and triune God who even when we were sinners deigned to rescue some of us caught in the web of our own making. And, furthermore, that he loves us with a love non-pareil, though not a facile “Beam me up, Scotty” sort of love, because this real God will not SAVE us without our own co-operation, gut-level repentance, and obedience.

Yes, we are summoned to the “breach” to defend, and marshal ourselves to see what sort of individuals and nation we truly are. The “tsunami” may inexplicably pause, and we are charged with dealing with societal metastasizing, to self-examination, to faith, and living in joy again, which is the carnal form of hope.

“A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and another song, “Bad to the Bone,” come to mind, and we will discover in weal or woe, irrevocably, in the context of the living God and his Jesus: Just who do you think you are? And who do you think you’re dealing with?

Hensleigh is a resident of Kalispell.