Details

Written by Rex M. Rogers

Published: 24 June 2024

What Bible version are you using, have you changed to a different version recently, and does one version vs another matter to your Christian experience?

Hi, I’m Rex Rogers and this is episode #155 of Discerning What Is Best, a podcast applying unchanging biblical principles in a rapidly changing world, and a Christian worldview to current issues and everyday life.

I grew up with the KJV, the King James Version. Didn’t everyone back to 1611?

Early in my career when I began speaking more, churches started using the NIV (1978) and my wife gave me a parallel Bible, KJV one side, NIV the other. I joked I could now shoot from either barrel. I used this for a few years because it both helped me study, drawing on wording with which I was long familiar, and helped me speaking if I happened to walk into a church that used one of the other versions.

In 1992, a few months after I became President of Grand Rapids Baptist College & Seminary, eventually Cornerstone University and Grand Rapids Theological Seminary, then Zondervan President Jim Buick gave me a brown leather my-name-embossed NIV that his company produced. With that beautiful new Bible, I shifted to NIV, leaving the heavier parallel version at home. 

Now, the ESV (2001) is becoming commonly used. Both the ministry with which I serve, SAT-7 USA, and our home church, First Baptist Church of Middleville, uses the ESV as its primary biblical resource. And I keep running into it in my travels.

I like the ESV. It’s a good version. 

Finally, then, a couple of weeks ago I decided it was time to step out on my own take on "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." I measured my faithful old, falling apart NIV and then looked on Amazon for Bibles the same size.  

What amazed me is that I not only found several choices, but most of them were also reasonably, if inexpensively priced, this for a product that can be $75 and up. The order was placed and about nine days later my new Bible arrived.

It's the same size, but then again it is not. The overall size of the book is nearly the same, but I intentionally ordered large print, so the font is bigger. This is a bow to advancing age and declining eyesight.

This happens to me in my work. I get a document written by a much younger colleague and it shows up in 9 or 10-point font, which I used “a long time ago in a galaxy far far away,” but not anymore. Now I go for 14-point font, so the Bible needed to be bigger print too, easier to use at my desk, better, or safer if you will, to use when I am speaking, meaning hopefully I don’t lose my place and can actually read when I need to do so.

Not long after I began this podcast, I wrote one called “Losing a Language of the Faith.” The idea was we’ve moved in my lifetime from a largely One-Bible-Version world to a Multi-Bible-Version world.  

Many different available versions of the Bible are a blessing of contemporary times and economic abundance, in other words, freedom. But there is a cost, even if we’re careful to select only those versions that accurately present the wording of the original autographs, we end up with choice run amok. We can end up with people in each church using multiple versions. If we memorize Scripture, or even if we are simply taught Scripture, we’re learning or hearing different wording and we may not recognize a verse from another version when it is cited.

This is what I mean about losing a language of the faith. We no longer can quote Scripture together.

I cut my teeth on the what’s now called the “old” King James Version of the Bible, the 1611 version that influenced the course of Western Civilization. When I memorized Scripture, I learned the language of the KJV, including all the “Thees” and “Thous” and “Verily verilys,” just like generations learned these passages before me.

When we went to church, we heard the KJV. There were no “pew Bibles,”—not that there’s anything wrong with them. But the point is: everyone had their own, usually black, KJV and carried it to church.

Though anyone my age—still happens—might speak from NIV or another version, but when a memorized verse comes to mind out comes KJV because it was imprinted indelibly on the brain since youth. 

I have several relatives or friends who’ve moved to a newer, easier to understand version, but having grown up on the KJV as I did, they want to stay close, so they use the New KJV.

Now, I have no problem with multiple Bible translations as such, as long as they maintain fidelity to ancient and original texts. I am decidedly not a KJV only guy and never have been. But I do think we’ve paid a price for the multiple versions of the Bible we now employ and enjoy. It’s a kind of embarrassment of riches. 

Pastors and churches have addressed this fact of life in various ways. Some pastors work hard a encouraging people who regularly attend to purchase whatever version he and that church regularly use. Some used a selected pew Bible and ask people to turn in it, citing page numbers. More often, with the help of projection, screens, and PowerPoint, Pastors place the Scripture on the screen, then everyone can relate to the same wording no matter the version in their lap.

One result of multiple versions and churches addressing the issue variously is that fewer people bother to carry a Bible to church. Some just access the Scripture via an app.

I am not suggesting “doing away with” multiple versions of the Bible.  

However, it still concerns me that we are losing a common Christian language within the Body of Christ,the Church, and what this might mean going forward for the Church. It concerns me even more that youth, already living in a highly chaotic pluralistic world, no longer learn or relate to the same biblical text. And if the Christian community is ever-less familiar with the Scripture – a form of biblical illiteracy – then certainly it is not much of a stretch to think the public will be even less familiar.

And if you pay attention to any of Christian researcher George Barna’s work, that is exactly what is happening:  less understanding of biblical stories, less understanding of theology, little or no evidence of a developed Christian worldview.

Now I am not saying multiple Bible versions is the reason for declining cultural understanding of Christian teaching. It’s more complicated than that. But it seems logical this is one additional source of the waning influence of Christianity upon Western culture.

But no Bible version means much if the Word is not read, is not studied, is not understood, and is not applied in the real world. We should not wrap the Bible with the American flag, but we should, so to speak, wrap the flag and the content of city newspapers—insofar as they still exist, but you know what I mean—we should wrap the Bible around current events and issues, vigorously applying our biblical worldview.

We live now in a post-Truth culture, one of the negative spinoffs of postmodernity.

People, especially Gen Z that have been and are being taught this lie in public schools, do not believe truth exists or can be known, so it is going to be more challenging than ever to live out the Christian life. But this is what our declining culture needs. It needs living testimonials, ambassadors of reconciliation, who believe truth, live truth, refuse to subjectivize truth (an oxymoron really), will stand against degenerate lies we hear daily on air and online, and will speak the truth in love.

The Gospel still stands as the most powerful transformative power in the world. No one, not a Christian-killer like the ancient Saul who via salvation became the Apostle Paul, not a murderer on death row, not a seemingly hopeless drug addict or dealer – as long as he or she is still breathing, as long as there is life, there is the message and hope and conversion of new birth in Christ wherein all things become new.

This hope is what our hopeless culture needs. This message of life is what our culture of death and culture that is dying needs. This love, forgiveness, and restoration is what our degraded, dissipated, perverted, addicted, evil, dissolute, demoralized, tragic culture, which is to say individuals, need. 

Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and you can read this in any accurate version of the Scripture.

Well, we’ll see you again soon. This podcast is about Discerning What Is Best. If you find this thought-provoking and helpful, follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Download an episode for your friends. For more Christian commentary, check my website, r-e-x-m as in Martin, that’s rexmrogers.com. 

And remember, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm.

© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2024   

*This podcast blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact me or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com/, or connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/rexmrogers or https://twitter.com/RexMRogers.

Details

Written by Rex M. Rogers

Published: 17 June 2024

Is America really ready for a world without good fathers?

Hi, I’m Rex Rogers and this is episode #154 of Discerning What Is Best, a podcast applying unchanging biblical principles in a rapidly changing world, and a Christian worldview to current issues and everyday life.

Fathers, or at least good fathers, are an endangered species in America. 

In the book Fatherless America (1996), David Blakenhorn notes that from 1960 to the 1990s the percentage of children not living with their biological fathers increased from 17.5% to 36.3%. These figures have increased into the high 40% levels and indicate that our nation is replete with citizens raised quite differently than generations born prior to 1970, in which over 80% of children were raised by their biological fathers.

So, we could ask, are fathers still important? Much has changed in our culture in my lifetime. The radio program, 1949-1954, “Father Knows Best” became a popular television series when I was a kid, 1954-1960. The actors were the well-dress, well-spoken, upstanding at least on air Robert Young and Jane Wyatt.

I also remember “Leave It To Beaver” with Ward Cleaver and “Ossie and Harriet” in which the married couple were shown retiring for the night to twin beds.

Then something changed, big time, in the 1960s. “Research has shown that the “patriotic” and “heroic” images of working-class fathers — i.e., the men who rebuilt America after the Great Depression and World War II — have been replaced by images of immature buffoons and schemers who need constant rescuing from their competent wives.”

Now there is nothing wrong with assured, competent wives, but in contemporary terms, this usually means the husband is a bumbling father like Fred Flintstone, Archie Bunker, Al Bundy, or Homer Simpson. Indeed, gaining speed in 1970s sit coms, if a Dad was in the house, he’s an idiot, or a goofball, or superfluous. He gives bad advice or burns the house down.

In the 1980s we had “The Cosby Show,” which, despite Bill Cosby’s later moral crash and burn, featured an upper middle class urban Black family wherein the father’s, the parents’, and the grandparents’ carried weight.

In the 1990s, we got “Home Improvement” with Tim Allen, Tim the Tool Man Taylor. This was an enjoyable family sit com that my boys, who were young then, and I watched regularly. But “The Cosby Show” of the 1980s and “Home Improvement” of the 1990s contrasted how American culture had changed in just ten years. In the Huxtable household on the show, misbehaving children always got a comeuppance from some family adult. In other words, lying had consequences. In the Taylor household on the “Home Improvement” show, misbehaving children sometimes resulted in parental discipline, but usually what the kids did was laughed off. No comeuppance. He lied, Ha Ha, and the lie was joked away.

In one later series episode, Tim was out one night at a bar, playing pool, and in walks a young woman wearing revealing clothing, who then makes a play for Tim. At first, this surprise flirtation appeals to and bolsters his male ego, but eventually he backs off. He never says or does anything overtly inappropriate toward the young woman signaling her interest. When he gets home, wife Jill asks him where he has been, and he lies to his wife about where he was and who he met. This lie is never corrected in the episode, just laughed off. Why? Why did a husband feel it appropriate to lie to his wife? This I don’t know, but I do know this is what American culture was becoming in the 1990s – lies are OK if they meet our needs of the moment. Dads no longer are paragons of virtue.

Think for a moment about world class gold medalist decathlete Bruce Jenner, once called “The World’s Greatest Athlete,” a “man’s man” and a “hunk” for sure, who went through marriages until he wed Kris Kardashian and became the father of two of the five Kardashian family sisters featured on “Keeping Up With The Kardashians,” 2007-2021. In the course of this programs run, Bruce was gradually portrayed for what he had become, an unnecessary and an emasculated pretend father. Infamously, in 2015, on the cover of “Vanity Fair” magazine he was portrayed in a woman’s hairstyle wearing a woman’s white swimsuit under the title “Call Me Caitlyn.” This was his coming out party as, he claims, a woman.

That same year, 2015, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges, “that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.”

This is just nine years ago, but since that time our culture has gone over a cliff.

A Father has now morphed into a woman, men can marry men, women can marry women, and soon thereafter, they began adopting children, ostensibly “fathering” these innocent children in the context of immoral relationships.

But we know fathers matter, not only because God said so but we now know from watching our own culture’s decline:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2020:

• 7 million children (33%) in the United States live in fatherless homes.
• Children living in fatherless homes have increased by 25% since 1960.
• 6% of Black children lived with their mother only in 2021.
• 85% of children with absent fathers get involved in crime.
• 70% of children in fatherless homes have dropped out of high school. 
• Children living in fatherless homes are 4 times more apt to live in poverty.
• Girls raised in fatherless homes are 8 times more apt to become a teenage mother.
• 85% of all children living without a father experience behavioral disorder.
• 63% of Suicides Among Children and Teens Are from Fatherless Homes. 
• Teenagers with positive and nurturing fathers are 80% less apt to go to prison.
• Children with Involved Fathers Are 40% Less Apt to Repeat a Grade in School.
• 75% of Minor Children Who Are Patients in Chemical Abuse Centers Came from Fatherless Homes. 
• 70% of Runaways, Child Murderers, and Juvenile Delinquents Come from Fatherless Homes.

Children who grow up in fatherless homes are more likely to experience a variety of challenges, including:

• Poverty
• Crime
• Educational problems
• Dropping out of school
• Teenage pregnancy
• Incarceration as an adult

So the presence of a good father, especially a Christian father, in the home when kids are young is a crucial, divinely-appointed contribution to the protection, stability, and potential of that family.

Not everyone, as we’ve noted here, was blessed with the experience of a good father. But if that is your experience, remember that if you are a believer, you have a good Heavenly Father, one who walks beside you, is always there, always ready to hear and engage with you, one who has spoken in his Word if we but listen.

I am one who was blessed with not only a good father but good, present, and engaged grandfathers on both sides of my family. My grandfathers were Christian men, they were upstanding, and therefore they were an outstanding model for me.

My father was a quiet personality, one who led more by example than by leadership up front, though he did some of this too when he was called upon. 

One small remembrance. I do not know when this took place, but I was very young, and I witnessed my Dad, finding 2-3 abandoned kittens. Now I remember men who thought it was admirable to spout their dislike of cats. And they took it to the next level, regaling us kids with tales of what they did to these innocent animals. I do not remember those incidents with respect.

But back to Dad, I do remember him picking up those kittens, speaking gently to them, petting them carefully, and then taking steps to find them a safe home. Why I remember that I do not know, but I’m glad I do for it is a good example of Dad’s quality.

What did my father/grandfather give to me?

1. Introduced me to faith in Christ and the Christian faith.
2. Loved my Mother.
3. Rock solid values.
4. Faithful in church.
5. Modeled incredible work ethic.
6. Finished well.

They are all in heaven, and now the baton has passed. It’s my turn now. 

Well, we’ll see you again soon. This podcast is about Discerning What Is Best. If you find this thought-provoking and helpful, follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Download an episode for your friends. For more Christian commentary, check my website, r-e-x-m as in Martin, that’s rexmrogers.com. 

And remember, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm.

© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2024   

*This podcast blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact me or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com/, or connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/rexmrogers or https://twitter.com/RexMRogers.

Details

Written by Rex M. Rogers

Published: 09 June 2024

Does it feel like to you, an American citizen, that you are losing freedoms? Is the US setting aside freedoms we will not be able to restore?

Hi, I’m Rex Rogers and this is episode #153 of Discerning What Is Best, a podcast applying unchanging biblical principles in a rapidly changing world, and a Christian worldview to current issues and everyday life.

It seems to me that America, if not the West including Europe, is losing its freedoms at an exponential rate.

The free-fall of freedom has been in the works for most of my lifetime back into the 1960s but moved to warp speed just five years ago with the advent of COVID-19. This virus, no matter what its source, though even the mainstream media now admits it began in a lab in Wuhan, China, created an opportunity for government officials to seize power with one inane mandate after another, all in the name of public safety.

Now we know, and again even many mainstream media sources acknowledge, that masks accomplished very little, that vaccines were of limited utility, and keeping children home from months of schooling is a set-back they will endure for their generation. Most of these government mandates were unilaterally handed down from on high by executive powers: governors, state health officials, school boards, mayors, and more with limited or no actual constitutional authority to do so. Edicts were issued and the American public acquiesced.

They went farther. People were pushed to stay in their homes, churches were ordered – “ordered” I said – to not open, and when finally they did open, people were expected to sit in every-other-pew or not sing hymns or function only via online streaming. You’d be forgiven if you asked, whatever happened to the First Amendment?

But all this was only a spike in the curve of government overreach and the consequent loss of personal freedoms that has been our lot in the new millennia.

During COVID, we thought we saw the threshold of the violation of basic rights, but the pandemic was only a springboard. During the summer of 2020, the horribly named “Summer of love” that actually was a summer of Black Lives Matter riots and lawlessness in the wake of George Floyd’s death while in custody, then his subsequent deification by the Left and mainstream media.

Prosecutors stopped prosecuting, police became the enemy and were in many communities “defunded” followed since by significant drops in recruitment, coupled with significant increases in early retirements by law enforcement officers who have seen the writing on the wall – public officials no longer back them up, no longer hold the criminal accountable even as they seem to believe victims have no rights at all.

“Non-prosecuting rogue prosecutors” – an oxymoronic mouthful that really does describe reality – are destroying the American legal system, minority communities, and peace and tranquility in cities across the country—and with it our freedoms. We the citizens have elected these leftist ideologues to do their jobs enforcing the law, but they have independently decided to do what they think is best, which is nothing in the face of crime and violence.

Gun control advocates argue for removing all guns from society, even as criminals continue to acquire guns and use them against law-abiding citizens. Journalistic attacks on so-called “Assault rifles” have become a red herring masquerading as intelligent discussion about crime. Meanwhile, “an assault rifle is not really a thing. It’s a look.” It’s just a symbol of a lot of heated talk surrounding guns that does not address the real issues in the streets that result in more killings, like those, every weekend in Chicago.

Educrats in public education at all levels now think they know what’s best for children and youth. Certainly, parents are not to be trusted. No, schools promote a host of morally degraded woke practices: drag queen story hours for children under 7 years of age, affirmation of all manner of gender ideology, including keeping any changes of pronouns, names, or other transitioning hidden from parents, sex education that is anything but age-appropriate taught in Kindergarten, race division and distrust supposedly to advance something called “antiracism,” teachers promoting leftist political activism that is anti-Israel and often antisemitic or blame America philosophies that destroys students’ confidence, much less patriotism, for their own homeland.

Social media has been coopted by government. No crisis is too small for government to exploit and to expand its power. Print and online media have descended into depravity, no longer focusing upon the best and highest of cultural achievements but the most debauched, not simply reporting these developments but propagandizing them, not only propagandizing them but championing them to teenagers and children. A one-time “focus on beauty and health morphed into a constant running celebration of sexual excess and abortion, with frequent criticism of men tossed in for good measure.” 

Pride Month is ubiquitously visible during the month of June. It is pushed by government agencies, even the US Armed Forces, local police forces, public schools, hospitals, retail businesses, entertainers or politicians making virtue-signaling comments, and otherwise forced upon almost every American citizen. Yet Pride Month has no legal standing.

What we’ve seen, though, is people losing their jobs for expressing different views, law enforcement being further defunded for noncompliance, people being “canceled,” meaning shunned or suppressed because they chose not to fly a pride flag or put a pride sticker on equipment or helmet. To ostensibly promote the freedom and acceptance of an immoral minority of the population, the majority is losing its freedom to disagree.

All this is only a part of the tectonic philosophic shifts underway in American culture, moving rapidly from an understanding of and respect for the traditional Judeo-Christian moral consensus that made education, law and order, economic progress, and civil tranquility possible in the first place, the same morality that birthed Western Civilization, energized discovery and free enterprise, held Americans accountable to their wrongdoing in slavery, Jim Crow, and discrimination, liberated science and gave education purpose, reinforced the famed Protestant Work Ethic, these traditional, time-tested values and verities have not only been rejected, but they are also being suppressed.

In the name of doing what’s right in our own eyes, truth is rendered relative and stripped of its power. In the name of equality, something called equity, has displaced blind justice in favor of weighted, identity politics wherein there is no justice, only chaos. In the name of diversity, we often get mediocrity.

In the name of antiracism, high schools and universities going retrograde on integration to hold separate Black and White commencements. In the name of freedom, freedoms are being taken away. Perhaps George Orwell was even more prescient than we thought.

The moment you think it can’t get worse, it does. It’s like there is no bottom to this madness.

To test this conclusion, one only needs to pay attention to what’s happening in Canada. What was once a free country is now a socialist, government dominated, left-leaning society. Or you can look at what’s happening in European cities – Berlin, Brussels, Paris, London, and more – every week. Vast numbers of illegal aliens marching in the streets, destroying property, chanting about sharia law or antisemitism, demanding free goods and services on top of the ample amount they’ve already been awarded, tearing down the country’s flag and raising Hamas flags, engaging in crimes against persons, including rapes, and screaming obscenities or harassing passers-by. This in cities once known for their refinement and culture.

Now do we despair? No, for like the Apostle Paul in Athens on Areopagus, we note the culture around us: “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. And (God) made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.” (Acts 17:23-28). 

God placed us in year 2024. He knows the challenges of our culture, the loss of freedoms, the zeitgeist of our age.

It is our privilege to know and to share that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17). It is our privilege and responsibility to communicate “you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (Jn 8:32). It is our privilege to proclaim, “so if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (Jn 8:36).

There are three ways to turn this around:

1. Ask God to send a spiritual awakening like he did in the 19^th
2. Vote out of office every radical, anti-God, anti-liberty politician and fire every bureaucrat who embraces the same.
3. That “for freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm” (Gal. 5:1).

Well, we’ll see you again soon. This podcast is about Discerning What Is Best. If you find this thought-provoking and helpful, follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Download an episode for your friends. For more Christian commentary, check my website, r-e-x-m as in Martin, that’s rexmrogers.com. 

And remember, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm.

© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2024   

*This podcast blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact me or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com/, or connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/rexmrogers or https://twitter.com/RexMRogers.

Details

Written by Rex M. Rogers

Published: 03 June 2024

Why, and how is it possible, that decades-old and influential American institutions are now in the process of destroying themselves?

Hi, I’m Rex Rogers and this is episode #152 of Discerning What Is Best, a podcast applying unchanging biblical principles in a rapidly changing world, and a Christian worldview to current issues and everyday life.

Referring to institutions in the West and specifically in the United States, writer and scientist Alan Joseph Bauer recently noted, “One institution after another is destroying itself, its credibility, and its influence.” 

It’s like American institutions are on a bender, rapidly adopting wrong, injurious ideas and practices based upon evil values diametrically opposed to what America has stood for since its founding.

For example, “the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to stop its offensive in Rafah. Israel will not stop its offensive in Rafah…By demanding that Israel stop fighting a critical part of its campaign to destroy Hamas, the ICJ has shown that it cannot stop Israel and is a paper tiger.”

“This empty ICJ order is one more step in the decline of the post-war major institutions that for seventy years have played outsized roles in world affairs…the FBI and DoJ have beclowned themselves to the point where nobody believes them any longer.”

“What we are witnessing is the self-destruction of major institutions, national and international. The UN, through its billion-dollar (United Nations Relief and Works Agency or) UNRWA office, was an active part of Hamas’ activities in Gaza. Their staff and facilities provided Hamas with a large part of their manpower and infrastructure.”

“The universities have made complete fools of themselves. Professors, once highly respected scholars…run interference for their demented students. Those students, after four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent, don’t know which river to which sea, could not find Gaza on a map, and are completely clueless as to what actually happened on 10/7.”

Given the number of public-school boards now dominated by woke ideologues, the rabid commitment of public educators to LGBTQ and specifically trans activism, declining productivity in learning, increases in school violence and safety concerns, and curricula given over to critical race theory racism, and the indisputable fact that while universities tout diversity, equity, and inclusion, there is a decided lack of conservative voices, i.e. intellectual diversity, allowed on campus, the public is losing confidence in all levels of public education.

The medical profession, once sitting atop the totem pole of respect in American culture, is increasingly seen as a vast bureaucracy given over to dependency on government funding, overpriced medical insurance, declining scientific rigor in assessing disease, and increasing politicization seen in the COVID-19 and vaccination experience, the willingness to mutilate children in the name of trans affirmation, and an unhealthy inclination to prescribe addictive drugs.

Mainstream media lie about political matters and candidates every day, so much so that media has suffered enormous drops in credibility and for some, even viability, going out of business.

Social media, though it has grown in number of users, has declined in credibility. About 59% of American adults do not trust news on social media. Too many stories, with documentation, of Big Social Media intentionally peddling disinformation about C-19, masks, vaxxes; too many stories, with documentation, demonstrating how Big Social Media intentionally shut down conservative websites and accounts – most prominently when then-named Twitter discontinued Pres. Donald Trump’s account for what they said was a “risk of further incitement to violence” – and then evidence of Big Social Media liberal bias, anti-free speech policies, and arrogance all combined to reduce the public’s trust of social media.

“Hollywood used to be the source of American entertainment. Hollywood made the movies and later TV shows that kept Americans busy and entertained. Those days are mostly behind us. Today, movie studios insist on lecturing or looking down on the audience.” The studios seem to want to virtue signal by being the studio that speaks the loudest about an alphabet of sexual proclivities. One movie after another is going woke, then going broke. This includes Disney, and this includes the video gaming industry.

The Trump trials are shredding what was left of respect for the criminal justice system. This follows the post-George Floyd riots of 2020, the so-called “Summer of love” featuring demonstrations laughably described in media coverage as “mostly peaceful” as fires raged behind the reporter, which destroyed billions of dollars of property, a significant portion belonging to minorities.

Then came the advent of what’s been called “rogue prosecutors,” which is to say, city, county, and state elected law enforcement officials who refuse to enforce the law. “Progressive” prosecutors sabotage the rule of law, raise crime rates, and ignore victims.”

“They believe the entire criminal justice system is racist. It’s absurd, but they believe it.”

The U.S. military, once considered the greatest and best in world history, is becoming a pale reflection of itself, thanks largely to Biden Administration policies emphasizing DEI over preparedness. “Today's American military has fully embraced the social imperatives of the Left and the most progressive aspects of American society. The U.S. Air Force selects officers based on a race- and sex-based quota system for officer applicants—an affirmative action program that would make the Ivy League blush.”

Over-commitment to woke social goals, including vigorous promotion of trans ideology, alongside decreasing and under-commitment to patriotism, readiness, and excellence, has translated to the US military failing to meet its annual recruiting needs. Young Americans don’t see opportunity, patriotic pride, and esprit de corps but rather division, rancor in the ranks, absence of earned stature, and dead-end.

Churches, or religion, is also suffering a decline in credibility. Many churches are shooting themselves in the foot, going woke, then, like entertainment, inevitably, going broke. These churches think the way to save the world is not by sharing the Gospel but by blowing with whatever new wind is passing.

If it’s a new idea, if it is not traditional Christianity, it must be good, so let’s jump on that bandwagon. 

Climate change is one of those new winds blowing. Churches in Europe and now in the U.S. are drinking the Kool-Aid of this latest culture of death. Soon, the church offers nothing different from the world, for the church is the world.

American institutions are in decline. Actually, they are one by one committing suicide through their own, active efforts to advance ideas and values contrary to and directly undermining the historic ideals that made America strong in the first place.

Our culture now “believe(s) in an ever-evolving world where moral standards are not constant, not absolute, are to be defined by the individual (or government), where there is no God to provide a fixed, final answer for mankind’s reason for existence, for mankind’s hopes, for mankind’s guidance. We live in a world today where the zeitgeist is defined by Darwinian, Marxian, naturalistic, materialistic atheism—no God will save us, we must save ourselves. Our “god” thus becomes whatever each individual wants him (or her) to be. Everybody defines their own purpose for existence, their own carnal lifestyle, their own personal moral code.”

This all sounds so liberating, so nice to do what’s right in our own eyes with no one to whom we report or are held accountable.

It sounds like, at last, humanity has evolved to a level of self-sufficient pleasantry wherein life is one long bacchanalia.

Charles Darwin thought humanity would evolve without God. But we’re devolving. No God, no truth, no morality, no accountability equals no sense of purpose, progress, or hope – just meaninglessness, which human beings can’t endure so we strike out in anarchistic nihilism. Chaos. 

Look what’s happening in American and European cities, everyday in the streets. Look what’s happening to our social institutions.

You’ve heard it said that ideas have consequences. Embrace the wrong ideas and reap negative results.

America needs a spiritual awakening, and soon.

Well, we’ll see you again soon. This podcast is about Discerning What Is Best. If you find this thought-provoking and helpful, follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Download an episode for your friends. For more Christian commentary, check my website, r-e-x-m as in Martin, that’s rexmrogers.com.  

And remember, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm.

© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2024   

*This podcast blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact me or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com/, or connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/rexmrogers or https://twitter.com/RexMRogers.