The State of America

TNG Radio, where today's culture and timeless truths come together.

It's reasoned relevant content apologetics, worldview, and answers to the questions that you need to know. From Alex McFarland Ministries, this is Truth for a New Generation Radio. And now, the man who preached in 50 states in 50 days, speaker, writer, and advocate for Christian apologetics, Dr. Alex McFarland. There are only three ways to teach a child. The first is by example, the second is by example, and the third is by example. So said theologian, sociologist, and influential thinker and writer Albert Schweitzer. Hi, Alex McFarland here.

Welcome to Truth for a New Generation Radio. And I want to talk about three things that I believe must be recovered and understood in the heart and the life of every American, regardless of age, if we're going to be the country that we currently aren't, but many assume we are a country of liberty, prosperity, morality, piety, a country of goodness. Alexis de Tocqueville, 1811 to 1813, interviewed people, wrote the famous work Democracy in America. De Tocqueville basically said America is great because America is good.

If she ceases to be good, she'll cease to be great. I want to talk about God morals and personal responsibility. But before I do, let me give you a reason why it's worth being grateful for America. I mean, we talk about our liberties and our freedoms, our constitutionally guaranteed rights, civil rights, which also, as we have to point out, come with personal responsibilities.

But here's another reason to thank God for the United States of America. Robert J. Gordon, I don't know if you know that name, but he's an economist at Northwestern University, very, very respected. He is an economist who really, 50 years ago, talked about rational understanding and rational expectations for economics. And he correctly predicted the recession of the 70s.

Pretty respected guy, Robert Gordon. And here's what he said, and I think it's worth talking about. He said, really, for millennia, no real new wealth was created. There were families, there were kingdoms, there were dynasties, and there were basically the royalty and the peasants. And for essentially, you know, more than 2000 years, there was no real new wealth created. Now, right now, even in spite of COVID, even in spite of the rioting and looting, I mean, there are more wealthy people in the world today than at any other previous time in history. There are more millionaires in America than at any other previous time in history. And my goodness, with the tech booms of the last 20 years, there are not only first generation millionaires, there are first generation billionaires.

Now, Gordon, Robert J. Gordon says this, it's interesting. Do you know when the world's acceleration in the creation of wealth began? In the late 1700s. It's interesting how in the late 1700s, suddenly, private property ownership began to be more and more widespread. People began to start businesses. By the time you get to the 1800s, which is the 19th century, and you've got the Industrial Revolution that began in largely in England, but really came to fruition here in the United States of America. And my goodness, the late 19th century, and you've got people like Colt, and the revolvers and Winchester with the rifles, and you've got, you know, Henry Ford and automation and the, you know, assembly line process. And you've got, oh, I think about the McCormick Reaper and the manufacturing of farm equipment. And let me say this, not only the Industrial Revolution that began in Europe, but I believe was perfected in America, the concept of interchangeable parts and businesses grew and businesses thrived and then ancillary industries would crop up around certain larger industries. Now here's my point.

Why? Why did suddenly, beginning in the late 1700s through the 1800s, and coming to explosive fruition in the 20th century, touching America, touching the world, what in the late 1700s, at the moment that the explosive expanse of wealth creation began, what other event was notable in the late 1700s? Of course I'm talking about the birth of America, 1787, our Constitution. And for the first time in history, really only since Israel, like under King Solomon, with the birth of America you had the principles of good civil government wedded with the principles of God's Word, and the presupposition, a beginning foundational assumption that man was not just to be exploited and controlled by dynastic despotic leaders. But no, we view humans as being made in God's image. There is a Creator.

We're made by God, and because we're made in the image of God, we have inherent worth and value and dignity. And it's no accident that for the first time in world history, large segments of the world would experience prosperity and the creation of wealth. It was no accident that it correlates with the beginning of America and the growth of America. Rodney Stark, a person I quote a lot, a twice Pulitzer nominated historian and sociologist, talks about how Christianity gave birth to science and understanding that the world is intelligible.

You can understand reality because God is a God of order. And then not only did science come out of the church, but also industry, personal property ownership, human rights, and the ability to, hey you gotta get up out of bed and work hard and put in a full day's work, but you can enjoy the fruits of your labor and you can become prosperous. Now here in America, we are watching, maybe it's out of ignorance, maybe it's out of malice, but certain academics and Democrat, liberal, progressive politicians are trying to separate the haves from the have-nots and use class envy and economic exploitation to try to build their voter base.

Not only is it counter to what America is all about, not only does it really put the brakes on the prosperity that has bettered the lives of so many people, but I would say the economic warfare and the class exploitation and class envy used by many liberals to try to grow their power base, it's dark, it's ungodly, it is inhumane. We're going to talk about that more when we come back. The Lord has a 100% track record in keeping His promises, and He lovingly offers to help everyone prepare for life and for eternity. Join Alex McFarland at the Cove as he shares from the Old Testament book of Daniel and the New Testament book of Revelation, the two most well-known books of Bible prophecy. Each reveals things about world history and the future that only God could know. Their prophecies could be a source of motivation, warning, and assurance. They can also be an apologetic persuasion for non-believers. Get clarity on which events today may relate to these two prophetic books and be equipped to answer the big questions and objections about prophecy. Daniel and Revelation, How God Wrote History in Advance with Alex McFarland, July 27th through 31st at the Billy Graham Training Center at the Cove. Find out more and register at thecove.org. When we're told to do something, we like to ask, why?

We don't follow traditions merely for the sake of tradition. We seek a biblical worldview and search for reasons behind answers. For the Christian who wants to dig deeper, there's engagemagazine.net, packed with relevant articles from movie reviews and life tips to culture and the believer's spiritual life. Share truth, apply scripture, engagemagazine.net. At Liberty University, you'll earn more than a degree. You'll earn the satisfaction of seeing what you can accomplish and what God can accomplish through you. Choose for more than 600 degree options from an associate to a PhD and study 100% online more affordably than you think. Discover God's truth through every degree at Liberty University, where we train champions for Christ. Go to liberty.edu backslash explore to learn more. That's liberty.edu backslash explore to learn more. For apologetics resources, books by Alex McFarland, and to find out where Alex is speaking, visit alexmcfarland.com.

Welcome back to the program. Alex McFarland here, and we're talking about our country. And I want to point out a book that years ago came out called What Every Christian Should Know. It was published by Christianity Today. There was a series of books about church history and just the relationship between the church and Western culture, and certainly Christianity and the birth of America.

And one of the writers of this book, it's out of print, but it's a really good book, I would encourage you to get it, What Every Christian Should Know. But it said American culture, and by that we're talking about our government, our culture, our values, the church, family. There's not a sense of place and not a sense of identity. Who cares that William Penn wouldn't take his hat off to the King of England? And who cares about William Bradford and the Plymouth Colony and Cotton Mather and the desire to raise our children under, quote, the dispensation of the gospel? And this book said America may be lost because, quote, nobody managed to pass it on. And that's why I read the quote by Schweitzer that we teach children by example and example and example. If people don't see us passionately loving and fighting for God and country, upcoming generations, they're not going to have that passion and value either, just apart from a miracle of God.

And so it's important to know what we're about. You know, Benjamin Franklin, the oldest person at the Constitutional Convention at 74 years old, and certainly one of the wisest there, Benjamin Franklin said that ignorance is the doorway to tyranny. And we really are in danger, my goodness folks, we're in danger of entering a dark age of tyranny under the liberal Democrat progressives that want to separate the classes using economics.

And they constantly lie to people, people that have needs, and they'll say look, you know, we're the only ones that can help you, the only way that you can survive, you need us because you need government to be your nanny. Listen to this folks, ignorance of how wealth is created, ignorance of the opportunities and the great potential you have just within yourself by virtue of the good Lord who made you. Ignorance of what America has been about is the doorway to tyranny. And I mentioned the fact that the world, this is a huge seismic shift in world history, the creation of personal wealth, personal property ownership, began really in the 1700s because of the beginning of America. And think about how many people have been unleashed and empowered to experience all that God put them here to do.

Now why? Just so we can aggrandize ourselves and live a posh, easy life? No, but God has blessed and prospered people for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is so that they could help underwrite the Great Commission. I've shared this quote, I wrote a book called Stand Strong in College, interviewed more than 300 college students and more than five dozen professors. And Stand Strong in College, we talk about the ways that college can challenge the faith of a young person, but I've said this many times, that college costs four years and $100,000 to discover that you can't know anything.

The late great Ravi Zacharias said that college is four years and more than $100,000 to discover that there is no truth. I think about the fact that college students are constantly told, unless they go to a solidly Christian school, that personal beliefs define truth. The Barna Research Group said recently a few years ago that four out of every ten adults strongly concurred that Christians, Jews, Buddhists and others all pray to the same God. And think about this, only one out of every six adults disagrees with this view. Kids are told that we make our own truth. Kids are told that America is evil and America is bad and we have got to do what Mortimer Adler said in the 1950s, editor of Encyclopedia Britannica and editor of the Great Books of the Western World, that we must strengthen ourselves, learn to think rationally, and be able to sift truth from out of the noise of subjectivism that has come to characterize just so much of the media and web and journalism that we take in. Now here's the thing, God morals personal responsibility.

Those have been the keys to our success as a nation and that the creation of wealth and personal liberties and the betterment of the human condition that God has used America to contribute to. Ben Shapiro, I'm sure you've seen his name. He's so prominent in the news these days. He's a great thinker.

I interviewed him on the radio several years ago. But in his book Brainwashed, Shapiro observed that college education at many a university today amounts to a four-year attack on America and God. And liberal arts degrees, and not politically liberal, but liberal as in learning from the various schools, the triumvirate science math and language or English. Liberal arts education has become anything but liberal.

At PC driven schools like Berkeley, the term university really ought to be changed to monoverity. Because kids are subjected just to one view, evolution, relativism, hedonism, the denigration of Western culture. History is revised. Western civilization is just so criticized. Christianity at best is ignored, but usually mocked. Darwinism goes unquestioned. Voicing conservative values will get you failed from classes. And it is just a given that traditional values are to be abandoned. Now folks, in personal interviews, literally with hundreds of students, professors and administrators of schools throughout all 50 states, it is mind boggling the stories that I hear over and over that education, and certainly college, has become less about the pursuit of truth, and more about imparting a carefully guarded, forcefully imposed narrative. Economic socialism, political globalism, moral relativism, militant secularism, and the only path to personal meaning, hedonism. Just live for pleasure, and stay out of the way while the elites rule the world and control our lives. My dear friends, with God's help, it has got to stop. We're going to come back after this.

Don't go away. Christians don't necessarily agree with one another when it comes to questions of religious pluralism, homosexuality, the role of government, abortion and war. Too often we manage these disagreements by ignoring them. Yet we're called to engage the world for the sake of Christ.

How can we be effective if we avoid society's most pressing questions? In Ten Issues That Divide Christians, Alex McFarland challenges us to drill down to the biblical core of ten current issues, such as social justice, evil and suffering, pornography and environmentalism, as he echoes the biblical invitation, Come, let us reason together. Only by engaging the scriptures deeply, thinking clearly, and speaking truthfully, can we in God's family address our differences and discover the peace that comes with unity of purpose. Ten Issues That Divide Christians.

Find this book and many others at AlexMcFarland.com. If you're a Christian parent, you of course want to instill a biblical view of life in the hearts of your children. If you're a pastor, you want to offer ministry that draws young families to your church. This is Alex McFarland encouraging you to check out my new book and video curriculum, The 21 Toughest Questions Your Kids Will Ask About Christianity. Why do bad things happen? I interviewed hundreds of children, ages five to twelve, and we address actual questions from actual children, the spiritual issues that are on the minds of your kids.

Did Jesus ever sin? The book and video lessons are great for groups of any size and was produced with the goal of equipping kids to stand strong for Christ in any situation. The 21 Toughest Questions Your Kids Will Ask, the book, study guide and video series. You'll find it at AFASTORE.net.

That's AFASTORE.net. In the midst of a culture obsessed with relativism, Alex McFarland is a voice you can trust to speak the timeless truths of Christianity in a timely way. You're listening to Truth for a New Generation Radio. Welcome back to the program.

We're talking about the state of America and how we must personally stand for God, morals, personal responsibility, leading by example. But I want to share with you how much I appreciate all of you and the feedback we've been getting from our webcast when the COVID situation hit and, you know, more than three dozen of our conferences and events and our summer camp, you know, so much of that just evaporated. We started doing, thanks to a very, very wonderful benefactor to our ministry, we're so grateful. But we've started doing a live webcast Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 11 a.m. Eastern Time. You can watch this on the Facebook page Rev Alex McFarland.

Now Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 11 we do a live webcast. We're talking about apologetics. We're talking about defending the faith, standing for God and country. And we give away a book every Friday. And so if you share publicly, Twitter and Facebook, if you share and post publicly, not just privately, but you're automatically entered to win a book, Ten Issues That Divide Christians, more than 200 footnotes. It's a book about American exceptionalism, the economy, even the moral issues, homosexuality, transgenderism, war, what should be the Christian's position on the military.

You can find all of my books online, but the one that we're giving away right now is Ten Issues That Divide Christians. And please watch us on Facebook, like us if you would. I do want to remind everybody that I will be at the COVE, the Billy Graham Training Center at the COVE July 27 through August 1 doing Daniel and Revelation.

And yes, there is still time for you to register if you go to theCOVE.org and I would love to see you there. And friend, it is imperative, especially as the election draws near. I'm just going to say, and this is not because of personalities, but President Trump and Mike Pence are doing such a great job.

And this is because of world view. It is imperative because of not only the replacement of, I think, about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but Justice Roberts, who has been left leaning in his decisions. The makeup of the Supreme Court is such an incredibly significant part of American life.

And one U.S. Supreme Court decision can have repercussions for decades. I mean, look at the Roe versus Wade decision, which by the way was eerily like the Dred Scott decision in the 19th century. The Dred Scott decision basically said, African Americans aren't persons, therefore, they are property. Roe versus Wade was so much like that, that how do they legitimize the killing of an unborn baby? They say, well, they're not persons. They don't have the constitutionally protected rights of other people.

And a woman's right to privacy means that she can have an abortion. And here we are decades later, so far from our moral compass, it will take an act of God for us to recover it. But friend, part of the reason that I pray God will overrule and intervene within our elections, and I pray for President Trump to get reelected. I pray that the liberal, progressive, godless worldview that sadly, the once great Democrat Party has so embraced in recent years, they are so far from their founding principles, that I pray that the House and the Oval Office are populated by constitutionalist principled Republicans.

Why? Not because of a party, but because of principles. Liberal, globalist, open borders progressives of today, they would not even allow the worldview of previous generation Democrats into the party platforms today. And so it's imperative for God and country and freedom that their agenda be defeated. This is no ill will to any individuals, but it most certainly definitely is a proactive positive stance for truth and God and morals, if our nation is to be saved.

Now, I want to say this, talking about the worldview of young people, unless your child has really steeped himself in the great traditions of Western thought and mastered critical thinking skills and is able to spot contradictions and fallacies and outright lies for himself, then an undergrad degree at most colleges will actually be a type of programming exercise designed to turn graduates into nice little compliant socialists, worker bee leftists. And so let me say this, we have got to have a renaissance, a rediscovery of the values and the truth that built our nation. But on a personal level, we have to have a renaissance of the gospel. Christians call this revival. The Bible talks about revival and how we need a revival in our nation.

So for America of 2020, and I love this nation and I love the Lord, and I know my home is in heaven, but apart from a move of God, we have got dark days ahead. Psalm 106 verse 21 says, They forgot God their Savior, who had done great things. In Psalm 103, David had said, Bless the Lord, O my soul, forget not his benefits.

You know, in Italy there is a saying, God created memory so that we could have roses in December. Friend, it is important not to forget all of the things that God has given us and all of the things that God has shown us. God has prospered America. We stand to lose it all if we don't rediscover America, but even bigger than that, if we don't return to the God of our founders and the God that up until a couple of decades ago we were proud to call upon. And thank God we have a president who knows our story and the God that birthed America. Friend, I want to pray and encourage you to think about the Lord, think about moral truth that we all must live by and think about the personal responsibility to know truth, model truth, proclaim truth, pass on truth, because as the Bible says, the truth will set you free. The longer we are alienated from truth, the less free and the more in bondage we are. The truth will set you free, and it will set our nation free. May God grant that we return to the Lord.