What happens when America kills its Christian soul

Is the idea of a Christian nation the definition of “absolute absurdity”? According to one Christian magazine, the answer is yes.

Earlier this month, the supposedly thoughtful Plough magazine published a breathtaking exercise in intellectual cowardice, dismissing the very foundation of Western civilization as “absolute absurdity.” The essay in question tackles the subject of Christian nationhood, but it reads like a surrender document, abandoning two millennia of proven governance for faddish defeatism.

To deny the role of Christian truth in Western greatness is like denying oxygen’s role in breathing.

What lunacy drives this thinking?

The greatest civilizations in human history — medieval England’s common law, America’s founding principles, Wilberforce’s abolition movement — all emerged from Christian bedrock. These weren’t theocratic nightmares but flourishing societies that elevated human dignity precisely because they recognized divine authority above earthly empires.

History is a series of patterns, and one of them keeps repeating in America.

Forged in faith

In the 1700s, the colonies rose against the monarchy not for the sake of godless liberty, but because they believed their rights were God-given, written into creation itself. Sermons rang from meeting-houses declaring that no king could overrule the King of kings.

In the 1800s, churches formed the backbone of abolition and reform. Preachers thundered that slavery was a sin before heaven. Abolitionists carried Bibles alongside petitions. And hymns like “Amazing Grace” became anthems of emancipation.

Their message was simple: Every man was equal because every soul bore the image of God.

In the 1900s, Martin Luther King Jr. stood in that same tradition, speaking from pulpits with scripture as his shield. His call for justice was never detached from his faith. He quoted Amos and Isaiah as readily as the founders, grounding civil rights in the authority of the Almighty.

Every advance in American freedom came wrapped in Christian conviction.

Wings, not shackles

But today we’re told these foundations are obsolete, that “Christian nation” is a dirty phrase, and that the values that guided our forefathers must be disavowed like toxic waste. The elites sneer that faith in the public square is “exclusionary,” as if the alternative — soulless secularism — has produced anything but despair, drugs, gender-bending, and fractured families.

But the truth couldn’t be any clearer.

Christian ideals were never shackles; they’re wings. Justice tempered by mercy. Individual worth regardless of station. Care for the vulnerable, not because it wins votes, but because it reflects the imago Dei. Moral accountability to a higher law that no king, no president, and no bureaucrat can erase.

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These principles are humanity’s highest aspirations. They built cathedrals that still tower when kingdoms fall. They gave birth to parliaments instead of pogroms, hospitals instead of hangings, and constitutions instead of cults. The entire Western canon — from Augustine’s “City of God” to Aquinas’ natural law, from Magna Carta to the Bill of Rights — rests on this sacred scaffolding.

Every liberty we prize today was planted in soil first tilled by faith.

Secularism’s harvest

This is what the Plough party misses. If America forsakes its Christian roots, it doesn’t drift into neutrality. It falls into the hands of new lawgivers, those who craft commandments for commerce — not for conscience.

Already we see this counterfeit creed: Banks cancel customers for thought crimes, corporations peddle ESG as ersatz salvation, Silicon Valley preaches virtue while addicting children and dismantling families, algorithms determine who can speak, credit scores determine who can buy, bureaucrats determine whose children are taught what is right and what is wrong.

From there, the descent is undeniable. When a boy is told he can become a girl by fiat, when schools scrub scripture but sanctify drag shows, when fentanyl fells more Americans than any war ever fought — this is the harvest of secular rule. A culture that once exalted discipline and faith now exalts indulgence and self-invention, producing generations unmoored, medicated, and utterly miserable.

Of course, critics will raise straw men.

• “Do you want to stone adulterers?
• “Is this an attempt to ban other religions?”
• “Are you trying to enforce Levitical law?”

No serious Christian makes such claims. The point isn’t theocracy. It’s renewal.

The true absurdity

A society shaped by Christian morality has always been freer than one governed by the cold calculus of power. The founders knew it. John Adams said it plainly, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Remove the moral compass, and the machinery of liberty grinds into tyranny. Without Christian restraint, power consolidates, rights vanish, and man becomes a cog in someone else’s machine.

Plough may shrug and call that “absolute absurdity.” But the absurdity is Plough’s.

To deny the role of Christian truth in Western greatness is like denying oxygen’s role in breathing. We can’t cut out the heart and expect the body to live. Every triumph of the West was animated by Christian conviction. To sneer at that inheritance is to sneer at the very civilization that grants these critics the freedom to sneer in the first place.

The blood of martyrs and the ink of reformers didn’t flow so we could trade a living faith for lifeless ideologies that serve only the state and the market.

America’s survival depends not on importing ideologies from Davos or Silicon Valley, but on returning to the well that never runs dry.