During the early nineties, the leaning Tower of Pisa started to lean too far. So engineers designed a plan to salvage the twelfth-century landmark from toppling over.
The project went through several phases. First, counterweights were placed on the base of the tower to slow down its tendency to lean. Second, the tower was harnessed with gigantic steel cables to prevent it from collapsing during reconstruction and to pull it back once the groundwork was laid. Finally, the foundation was reinforced, and the cables were pulled to make the 180-foot-high tower more upright. Fortunately, the project was a success.
Left to itself, our nation today faces the same threat, which once loomed over the leaning Tower of Pisa: tilting and headed toward catastrophe. The effort to elect public officials who support policies more consistent with biblical teachings has been the project to save our Republic.
In his excellent book, Politics According to the Bible, Wayne Grudem explains the stark differences between the two major political parties in America:
There is a significant difference in the religious beliefs of Republicans and Democrats taken as a whole. Conservative evangelicals, who tend to believe that the Bible is God’s Word in its entirety, have tended to align with Republican principles. So have others whose religious views lead them to believe in absolute moral right and wrong, such as Roman Catholics, Mormons, and more traditional Jews.
But people who have no religious belief at all, or who do not believe that we can know what God has told us with regard to moral standards, tend to be moral relativists, and this aligns them much more closely with the Democratic Party and its emphasis on allowing people to choose abortion or choose homosexual marriage and so forth.
The differences between Democrats and Republicans today have great significance. These differences are not accidental, but stem from differing convictions about several moral and theological issues.
Of course, some insist our system of laws must somehow be religiously or morally neutral. The truth is such neutrality is completely impossible. No system of government operates in a vacuum.
As the late and renowned Presbyterian minister, Dr. D. James Kennedy used to argue:
Every nation in history, without exception, has been founded upon some theistic or anti-theistic foundation – whether you go back to the ancient pagan nations of Egypt, Babylonia, Syria or Rome, or consider the modern nations today of England, Italy, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, China or any of the countries, including the U.S. All have been built upon some theistic or anti-theistic foundation…[O]ut of this theistic or anti-theistic foundation there inevitably grows a set of ethics or morals. These grow out of the religious substratum or foundation…[O]ut of these sets of ethics or morals there grows or is enacted or codified, legislation. All legislation is simply the enactment of some ethical standard that grows out of some religious foundation.
When we understand this, which is so utterly fundamental to understanding the world in which we live, we see through some of the big lies we’ve heard so frequently in our time, such as, ‘You can’t legislate morality.’ How many times have we heard that, as if that were true as the fact that the sun rises in the morning?
The truth of the matter is, my friends, you can’t legislate anything but morality. We pass laws because something is moral or immoral. We have laws against killing because it’s immoral to kill. We have laws against rape because it’s immoral to rape. We have laws against child abuse because it’s immoral to abuse children.
For several decades, America has been sliding morally downward. Godless and immoral people have had an undue influence on public policy. Since the election of Ronald Reagan as President, however, religious and political conservatives have tried to pull the nation back from spiritual and ethical collapse. Although far from perfect, overall, the persons elected with political positions more aligned with an orthodox Christian worldview have worked to ...
