Was America founded as a Christian nation? What generated the seeds of the American dream and who or what does it serve? Are there beneath-the-surface ideas (like the inevitability of progress through a religion free reason, science and technology) inhabiting our culture and driving us like lemmings over a cliff with no soft landing? Are wealth and power conduits of justice or snares that weaken moral character?

Does the God of Christians like to see large gaps between rich and poor or did he command measures that would stop this? Who thinks America’s greatest days are ahead of it? Can a pathological liar, adjudicated rapist, three-time adulterer, convicted and massive tax cheater, bankruptcy artist, insurrection stoker and fake president (won by lying) lead a nation? Was Protestant reformer John Calvin right when he said, “When God wants to judge a nation he gives its people wicked rulers?”

Two big questions remain. 1. Is created life, however generated, a gift or a curse? If a gift, then how should it be managed? If a curse, then how can its evil be overcome? 2. Are we humans inherently good and on a path to perfectibility or, without intervention, doomed to suffer the consequences our gods have led us into? This brings us to a need for seeing what’s been hidden.

Human life (born, unborn and meant to be nourished by a healthy Earth) is precious and can’t be lived with favor in the absence of moral limits. When it’s said that America was birthed as a Christian nation, one must ask why most of the founders were deists, not Christians, liked the God-hating thinkers of the Enlightenment and willingly participated in a slave-based economy.

Nor is it even considered that the first seeds of the American dream may have begun with the killing of Indians. Settlers found themselves wanting land Indian tribes had been living off of for centuries. So they, and the U.S. government, assuming a right to have this land, overpowered, killed and eventually forced Indians into restrictive reservations (mostly in Oklahoma) to get unlimited access to the land they wanted.

This pattern of assuming ownership over land and people was both a common and rich man’s privilege. What it did was establish what might be called a permission structure for the white man to marginalize and take advantage of red, Black, brown, poor and powerless people in order to situate wealth, power and privilege in themselves.

After slavery was officially ended by the Civil War, it did not take long for defeated Southerners to find new ways to marginalize, mistreat and even hang “the negro” who dared to assume equality with “the white man.” Not long after the Civil War, the ugly behavior reemerged in the “Gilded Age,” where big business owners subjected workers to long hours, low pay, inhumane, unsafe workplaces, child labor and the like. Slavery has many expressions.

So, where do we go from here? We now live in the ashes of liberalism’s death because to continue it has always needed a countervailing sense of limits long supplied, in this culture, by Christianity. The continued decline in church attendance is not encouraging and we Christians, I’d argue, are a mixed historical bag when it comes to race.

Christianity needs a second Reformation and sensitive humanists need us to succeed so that theirs and other thoughtful voices will continue to be heard. Tell me something more tolerant than a God who allows his life-sustaining rain and sun to come even to people who blaspheme his name. Liberalism’s openness marginalizes Christianity by privatizing it.

Suffice it to say that the current president and his acolytes have more interest in power than in good governance, which is why they supply no preponderance of factual evidence for the so-called corrupt, inefficient government agencies they want to “clean out” and repurpose on their their way to permanent power.