The Battle for the Soul of America

Dr. Edward Hindson
Assistant to the Chancellor, Liberty University

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The battle for the heart begins deep within the soul. Our inner emptiness cries out for something more, and the world rushes in to fill it. For some, it is an addiction. For others, it is a relationship. But whatever it is, it begins to draw us away from God. At first we try to resist it. But eventually we embrace it and lose all sense of spiritual restraint.

Dr. Gary Collins suggests that we have become a “nation of strangers” characterized by isolation and disconnection. We rush from place to place and build our lives around one-way emotional attachments with the faces of our television and computer screens. Dr. Collins ob-serves, “This increasing isolation has been linked with a century-long withdrawal from religion.”

Slowly, God has been shunted aside; cynicism and distrust have emerged as dominant lifestyles. Morals have become relative, leaving vulgarity and violence to run rampant. The soul of American society is empty and rootless. Instead of driving us back to God, this emptiness pushes us to fill the voids in our hearts with food, sex, celebrities, and consumer products. Advertisers, professional helpers, exploitive therapists, corrupt politicians, money-hungry marketers, and even some religious leaders offer us an array of harmful solutions that only encourage our self-indulgence.

Dr. D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries suggests that the anti-Christian bias of television, movies, and the media are slowly eroding the morals and beliefs of Christians as well as non-Christians. He says, “If Christians are portrayed at all, they are characterized as fanatics, hypocrites, extremists, ignoramuses, uneducated and bigoted.” Not only is the media guilty of misrepresenting religion in general, but for denigrating Christian morality in particular.

Hollywood has paved the way for an open assault on Christianity and its morals and values. This has led to an all-out war against Christianity in the pop culture of our times. Movies, television and music all join forces to denigrate Christian be-liefs, morals and values. The impact of this combined force is corrupting society and weakening our churches. Every element of our social fabric is being ripped apart by this demonic assault on the hearts of the men and women of our generation.

Candy Coat the Appeal

The Bible warns us to “guard” our hearts because our hearts are so vulnerable to deception. The world’s appeal to the heart often bypasses the rational processes of the mind. We can watch a TV program or a movie that does this so effectively that we find ourselves cheering for the moral opposite of what we claim to believe.

The Oscar-nominated movie Chocolat is a perfect example. The story is set in a small French village in the 1950s. The plot revolves around the moral leader of the community, a staunchly Catholic mayor, and a free-spirited woman who deliberately opens a chocolate shop at the beginning of Lent, in opposition to the mayor’s religious protests. Almost immediately, the viewer is encouraged to side with the antireligious chocolatier. Before long, she allures the entire community to side with her. In the end, even the mayor and the parish priest cave in to her allurements.

The movie is highly entertaining and very well acted. But it definitely sends a powerful subliminal message that religion is far too moralistic and ought to lighten up and embrace all people as spiritual equals, even if they have no religious beliefs at all. At a crucial point in the story, the mayor observes, “What could be more harmless than chocolate?” But it was the seeming innocence of chocolate that gave the woman the opportunity to spread her message of an irreligious lifestyle in such an entertaining manner that the viewer is compelled to take her side as the story develops.

Our hearts are rarely tempted by the onslaught of evil in its most brazen and despicable forms. Such assaults offend our moral sensibilities, and we tend to reject them outright. But what does tempt us is the gradual allure of small departures of the heart. A little indulgence here or there is tolerable enough to excuse without bombarding ourselves with guilt. Slowly, but surely, each little departure takes us further away from the purity of heart God intends for us. Things once viewed as outrageous behavior are now quite commonplace in our society.

The Attack on the Soul

The human soul, like the human heart, is the expression of the inner life of the human existence. It is the area within us where our God-consciousness is inflamed by the Spirit of God. Theologians call this God-awareness the imago dei (image of God). It is that aspect of God’s creative genius that enables us to know Him, despite our fallen nature.

The image of God was affected by sin, but not erased. It was distorted, but not eliminated. There is left in every human heart the realization that there is Someone greater than ourselves. Theologians, philosophers, and psychologists call this the “mystery of transcendence.” It is that inner sense that the real meaning of life transcends our mere physical existence. But this awareness alone is not enough to lead us to a personal relationship with God — that is only revealed to us in the divinely inspired Scrip-tures.

As the 20th Century drew to a close, it be-came painfully obvious that our generation had not only lost confidence in the Bible but in God Himself. The century-long bombardment of secular humanism had taken its toll on the soul of America just as it had in Europe in the 19th Century. Once a society loses its heart and soul, it loses all sense of the transcendence of the divine, and life becomes little more than a meaningless existence.

The impact of the anti-God bias of secular education has left our generation without God, morality, meaning or purpose. We are a society adrift on a sea of moral relativism that can only be described as “lost.” This theme of cultural emptiness and personal loss, which is nothing more than an expression of the emptiness of the human soul, dominates today’s music and entertainment.

Even in religious circles, there is a growing tendency to view God as Some-one who exists to meet our needs.

The Morticians Are Here!

The death of Western culture is a fact that is well established both by secular and religious thinkers. The patient is dead. The heart has stopped beating. The morticians are in the lobby. Still, the doctors of the soul are scurrying about to see if there are any other options left. Resuscitation? Electropulmonary shock? In the meantime, the life-support systems have been hooked up to artificially sustain the victim.

Matters of the heart are God’s chief concern. God promised that He would give His people a new heart and a new spirit (Ezekiel 36:26). God promises that we can experience a radical transformation of heart and spirit. This is a fundamental change that occurs from within and is produced by God. It is not the result of self-improvement or human effort; it is the work of divine intervention into our helpless situation.

God is a heart surgeon of incomparable skill. He removes our old, dead hearts of stone and replaces them with living hearts that are responsive to Him. These new hearts provide us with new life, new direction, new desires and new possibilities. The corpse of Western civilization is getting colder every day. Without divine intervention, it will not resurrect itself.

The Bible urges us, “Do not lose heart” (II Corinthians 4:16). There are two parallel, yet opposite, streams of biblical prophecies about the future. On the one hand, the Bible promises the spread of the Gospel and growth of the church until Jesus comes (see Matthew 16:18 and 24:14). On the other hand, it also predicts the increase of wickedness and the spread of evil as we near the end of the age (see Matthew 24:12; II Timothy 3:1-5).

Both streams of biblical prophecy are equally true. We have a mandate to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ no matter how evil the days may become. But we do so with the solemn awareness that this world is inevitably on a collision course with disaster. Unless we experience a genuine revival of biblical spirituality and righteousness, there is no real hope for the future. We can call for the divine Doctor or bring in the secular morticians. The choice is ours.