About 20 years ago, when Americans had so decayed as to elect the anti-American fool Barack Obama as their President, and when the courts of law sanctified paganism via same-sex marriage, a brilliant American scholar, learned in law and literature, became ashamed of being an American!

Sadly, there must be many of such mortified Americans. I see this in my extensive electronic mail. It conveys many essays bewailing America’s decline and predicting the demise we see in Europe. 

One sign of this demise is hatred of Jews and Israel, which heralds disaaters . Another is the university-bred doctrine of moral relativism. While this doctrine places the savagery of the Palestinian Authority and the humanitarianism of Israel on the same level, an absurd number of semi-educated American presidential candidates say nothing about this moral decay that is disemboweling their country.

They are tongue-tied. We hear hardly a word about the noble ideas and ideals of America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution. These wedded documents give voice to what is sacred. They convey the magnificent and all-embracing concept of “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” from which we derive our inalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Yet no public figure dwells on this exalted humanism, even while America is threatened by Islam’s leveling totalitarianism. America has abandoned God. 

Without God, Americans have become orphaned. Without God they have lost their moral compass. America was founded by Columbus a navigator, a learned Jew. This was providential. Let us dare think like Jews. 

The Declaration of Independence speaks of God as the Creator of heaven and earth, as the Supreme Judge, and as the source of our Providence. The Declaration is America’s immutable “Written Law.” The Constitution is our dynamic “Oral Law,” which enable us to reconcile permanence and change. Both Laws were parented by the Bible of Israel. This is most clearly indicated in the Book of Genesis, less obviously the Hebraic Republic of antquity, as was recognized during the American Revolution, and known by Harvard President Samuel Langdon and Yale President Ezra Styles.

America's lofty parentage was forsaken by the ungrateful and arrogant mentors of academia. Americans thus became orphans.
This lofty parentage was forsaken by the ungrateful and arrogant mentors of academia. Americans thus became orphans.

It began with the ascendancy of Progressivism in the first decade of 20th century. That period witnessed scientific and philosophic materialism, which took America by storm, has dominated higher education to this day. As a consequence, immutable “natural rights” have given way to the dispensation of government “entitlements,” as transient as the results of biennial elections.

Meanwhile the Supreme Law of the land, the Constitution, which hitherto had reconciled permanence and change, became an evolutionary document – a “living constitution,” waxwork in the hands of nine unelected judges.  This illuminati relegated to the dust heap the Republic’s venerable principle of “government by the consent of the governed” A normative Republic metamorphosed into a normless democracy.

Just as science since Galileo is morally free, so American democracy is morally free. Scientific materialism, with its preoccupation with what is tangible and quantifiable, became the standard of all knowledge, of truth. This rendered religion and morality obsolete. Moral and religious values were explained in terms of sub-rational forces, the libido, the lust for power, or as a mere facade for geed or avarice. Freud and Marx became the high priests of academia. Their leveling of the intellect corresponds to the leveling  egalitarianism of democracy.

Scientific materialism has thus been a blessing and a curse. While it fostered material prosperity and thus spread the blessings democracy, it also distanced God from private and public life, and thus precipitated America’s moral and political decay. This brings us back to that erudite American scholar who became ashamed of being an American. (Part 1 of 2)