Has America Lost Its "Spark of Divinity?"

During a White House roundtable with elected officials from California opposed to the state’s politically correct “sanctuary” policy, a local sheriff brought up the scourge of MS-13: “Thank you.  There could be an MS-13 member I know about, if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about them.”  President Trump responded: “We have people coming into this country, trying to come in…we’re stopping a lot of them.  But we’re taking people out of the country.  You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are.  These aren’t people. These are animals.”

During her weekly press conference, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi repeated the left-wing talking point that President Trump had directed his reference to MS-13 as “animals” to all illegal immigrants: “There’s a spark of divinity in every person on Earth and that we all have to recognize that as we respect the dignity and worth of every person and as we recognize the responsibilities of the spark of divinity within us.  And so when the President of the United States says about undocumented immigrants, ‘these aren’t people, these are animals,’ you have to wonder ‘does he not believe in the spark of divinity, the dignity and worth of every person?’”

One could easily ask the same question of the rabidly pro-abortion Mrs. Pelosi.  She obviously does not believe that unborn children possess a “spark of divinity.”  An increasing number of states, especially on the left coast, have legalized euthanasia, which makes it clear they do not believe the elderly and terminally ill have dignity and worth or a “spark of divinity.”  In Pelosi’s home state of California, a bill legalizing euthanasia has faced a court challenge, as a Riverside County Superior Court Judge has struck down the law as unconstitutional because the California legislature put together the law during a special session convened to deal with “Medicaid funding and related issues” in an effort to avoid going through the normal legislative process.  We’ll see if the House Minority Leader cites the “spark of divinity” when commenting on the judge’s decision.    

The phrase “spark of divinity” can also apply to a nation-state, in addition to individuals.  In my previous column, I discussed the decline of church attendance and religiosity in Ireland and tied it to the country’s recent vote to legalize same-sex marriage and its likely future vote to legalize abortion. Unfortunately, a similar phenomenon has taken place in the United States. 

From 2007 to 2014, the overall number of Christians has declined from 78.4 percent to 70.6 percent while the number while the share of the population who identify themselves as “atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular” has risen from 16.1 percent to 22.8 percent.  More than a third of millennials, born between the years 1981 and 1996, fall into the “unaffiliated” category.  It looks like liberals’ master plan to uproot Christianity from the soul of the western man has largely succeeded. 

Less than half of Americans attend religious services weekly.  The most religious states, identified by Gallup, tend to vote Republican.  On the other hand, states with very low church attendance rates tend to vote for the Democrats. This shouldn’t come as much as a surprise, why would religious people vote for a party who forces the increasingly small number of nuns to pay for birth control and thinks they belong in the “basket of deplorables?” States with high numbers of Evangelical Protestants have a higher weekly attendance rates than states where a plurality or majority of the population identifies as Catholic have lower weekly attendance rates.

Now for a personal anecdote: Half a century ago, the town my parents grew up in, located in upstate New York, had nine Catholic churches, which each had at least one priest, seven Catholic schools serving students in grades K-8, and one Catholic high school.  Today, the area has one full-time priest that rotates between the remaining six parishes, one Catholic school serving students in grades Pre-K through 6 and the Catholic high school now serves students in grades 7-12.  Some of this could be more of a “rust belt” problem than a secularization problem, as the population has shrunk from around 50,000 to around 30,000 today. But as the map above shows, New York has one of the lowest attendance rates in the country while other “rust belt” states such as Michigan still have higher church attendance rates despite suffering similar population losses.   

In the town I currently reside in, the lone Catholic school will shut its doors at the conclusion of this school year.  With a population of around 20,000, the town still has three parishes, each with at least one full-time priest.       

Liberals have spent the past half-century offering failed solutions to the many challenges America faces.  In order to solve the opioid crisis, legalize marijuana.  In order to reduce teen pregnancies, sell condoms in vending machines at public schools and require all health insurance plans to cover birth control.  In order to stop mass shootings, ban all guns.  In order to eradicate poverty, provide cradle-to-grave entitlements. 

None of these solutions address the root problems that make people want to shoot up heroin or shoot up schools in the first place.  People resort to violence and drug use when they fail to find meaning in their lives.  People turn to drugs, MS-13, or the latest “gender identity” group in an effort to find meaning in their lives.  Popular culture advocates that people turn to anything but religion; after all America’s Sweetheart Joy Behar considers praying a form of mental illness.  Many in the American public fail to realize that religion often serves as the antidote for depression and nihilism.  Rita Dunaway pointed this out in a recent column titled “Where Christians Go Wrong on the Poverty Issue:”  “But the truths of God’s Word, diligently proclaimed and followed, hold the power to break the cycle of poverty and dependence for many Americans today.” 

Since the dawn of the Cultural Revolution more than half a century ago, no two groups have done more to extinguish the spark of divinity in the United States than the government and popular culture.  As people increasingly reject a higher power for guidance, they increasingly look to the government to solve all of their problems; which comes as good news to liberals, who hope to massively increase the reach of the nanny state.  Liberals had first instituted some social programs such as social security in the 1930s as a response to the Great Depression.  As they enjoyed an overwhelming majority in Congress, liberals introduced the “Great Society” program in the 1960s as part of a “war on poverty.” In hindsight, one could say that it intentionally had the opposite effect: to make as many people dependent on the government as possible.  The creation of the welfare state led to the explosion of single motherhood.  People avoided having children out of wedlock before the advent of the welfare state because they knew it would doom them and their child to lifelong poverty.  The welfare state actually provides incentives for women not to get married.  While the economic consequences of single motherhood may “disappear” thanks to the nanny state, the state can never erase the social consequences for single motherhood, now matter how much it thinks it can.      

The Courts have also done a great deal of harm to the country in advancing an anti-religious agenda, by taking the idea of “Separation of Church and State” to the extreme and declaring war on religious liberty.  As Ann Coulter pointed out, “The Supreme Court granted constitutional protection to the most vile forms of pornography. Hollywood dumped the Hays Code, and promptly went pedal-to-the-metal on movies showing the bright side of the sexual exploitation of women.”  While the Courts gave people the “freedom” to abort their children and marry someone of the same gender, the government took away the freedom of churches to weigh in on these new cultural trends with the Johnson Amendment, which threatens to revoke tax-exempt status from Churches that endorse or oppose particular political candidates.  President Trump said that he would repeal the Johnson Amendment if elected but those efforts have yet to bear fruit.

Rather than change the culture, some churches have let the culture change them.  Take a look at Episcopalians, for example.  As Ann Coulter pointed out, Episcopalians “have girl priests, gay priests, gay bishops, gay marriages.”  The political correctness hasn’t exactly helped the Episcopalians increase their membership; mainline Protestantism, which the Episcopal Church falls into, continues to face sharp declines.  Apparently not seeing this data, many in the Catholic Church and many outside of the Catholic Church want the church to become more “hip” in an effort to attract new members.  

Churches embracing the worst impulses of the popular culture will do a massive disservice to those seeking to find genuine meaning in their lives.  Rita Dunaway sums up the problem nicely: “The popular ‘follow your heart’ mantra at the center of popular culture today may sound harmless, but it is the way to broken lives, broken families and a people who are impoverished spiritually, emotionally and financially. It is the province of the church to counter this cause of poverty – not to lobby the government to alleviate symptoms of poverty.”  

While liberals have done everything they can to extinguish the spark of divinity, 75 percent of Americans say that Americans becoming more religious would have a positive impact on American society. These Americans should band together to work to reverse the trend of decreasing religiosity that has become synonymous with the United States and western culture as a whole. While there’s no guarantee that a more religious society will solve every problem America faces, every American should realize that the experiment to find “Good Without God” has created infinitely many more social and economic problems than it has solved.  To quote President Trump, “what do you have to lose?”