Removing God creates a vacuum

OPINION:

In his book “What Americans Believe,” George Barna points out that 87% of non-Christians and 77% of self-described born-again believers agreed with the statement “People are basically good.” In other words, our culture, by and large, has discarded the idea of original sin.

The sophisticated among us roll our eyes at the concept of innate human corruption. We snicker at the notion that certain actions, thoughts and behaviors are still deemed to be sinful. The very idea of sin seems a bit too Victorian to us. “It is judgmental and prudish,” we say, and we are quick to condemn anyone who dares suggest that we are anything less than good people.

The whole idea of sin has gone the way of the horse and buggy. It is an outdated and useless concept that has been replaced by more modern ways of understanding the human being and human experience. Men and women are born good, and suggesting that anyone comes into this world with a corrupted nature and is guilty of sin is, well, a sin.

The irony, however, of denying this biblical understanding of human nature is that if you boil it all down to its basic premise, it is really nothing more than the celebration of what Scripture calls the “fall.” That is, the fall of everyone wanting to “be as God” and thereby deciding for themselves what is right and wrong, just and unjust, and true or false. It’s the fall of us declaring who is male and who is female and even presuming to define life and death.

Such autonomous power is to become our own God, for we no longer need him to know the difference between good and evil.

In our denial of a sovereign, we have, ironically, found one. We are the ultimate ruler. There is only one king, and it is us. We will bow to no one else.

St. Paul warned of this 2,000 years ago in his letter to the Romans. He told us the danger of worshipping the created rather than the Creator is that it inevitably leads to bondage rather than freedom. Elevating ourselves over God always leads to slavery to sin, either ours or someone else’s.

The lessons of history have proved repeatedly that when men make this mistake, the consequences are dire. Millions have suffered in the prisons and died in the furnaces from such idolatry.

The paradox in all of this is that admitting the existence of our depravity is the only bulwark against it. As G.K. Chesterton famously argued, “Original sin … is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved,” and the best minds in human history (such as Jefferson, Adams, Washington and Monroe) “all took positive evil as the starting point of their argument.”

In other words, our Founders understood that “when there is no king in the land, everyone starts doing what is right in their own eyes,”(Joshusa 17:6) and culture collapses under the weight of human depravity. They did believe we needed a king, and his name was Jesus. Or, in the words of Thomas Paine: “Where, say some, is the King of America? I tell you, friend, he reigns above.”

At its core, the “No Kings” movement is really nothing more than a repeat of the millennia-old cycle of the original sin. Eating the fruit of the forbidden tree, these people become their own monarch as they haughtily rise and shout, with the maniacal confidence of Diderot, “We will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!”

We dare not, however, forget that if the French Revolution teaches us anything, it is this: When you take God out of the public square, it creates a vacuum that will quickly be filled with despots and demagogues. Shouts of “No Kings” always lead to someone who is only too willing to use the guillotine to secure his reign.

Back in the 1970s, Billy Preston sang, “Nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’.” He was right. Sooner or later, “you’ve gotta have somethin’” to fill the void. Chaos always demands a correction. We all will have a king. It will either be the one we see in the Bible or the one we see in the mirror.

Without a savior, sin always rules.

• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery). He can be reached at epiper@dreverettpiper.com.