By Arthur Goldberg Published on March 28, 2023
In Deuteronomy, the Bible provides humanity with a choice. Obedience to biblical morality leads to a society of blessings while willful disobedience of such commands leads to a culture of decadence. (Deut. 11:26, 27-28)
Today I am giving you a choice. You may choose the blessing or the curse. You will get the blessing if you listen and obey the commands of the Lord your God that I have told you today. But you will get the curse if you refuse to listen and obey the command of the Lord your God.
Led by militant secular ideologues who seek to destroy the fabric of American civilization, American culture is jettisoning the moral standards revealed by God in the Bible. And so society itself is under a sustained attack. However, long ago, America’s founding fathers recognized that if we were to survive as a nation, we needed moral discipline premised upon the commandments of a transcendent Supreme Being. That American prosperity would rely on values incorporated in the founding documents such as individual responsibility, limited government, and religious freedom.
Forced to Be “Free”
Today’s left-wing elites rely on the coercive powers of government officials and “woke” institutions to enforce their own concept of morality. But our founders believed that such moral values needed to be independent of governmental power (as codified in the Bill of Rights).
What can we do to bring our country back to the biblical morality of America’s founding principles? We could ask the famous liberal English anthropologist J.D. Unwin. He chronicled the historical decline of 86 primitive and civilized societies over 5,000 years. From all this, Unwin admitted that he could find no instance of a society that did not experience social and economic decline once it abandoned principles akin to biblical morality — and in particular, sexual self-restraint.
Biblical Holiness
While popular culture tends to portray sexual promiscuity as “natural” and “normal,” God commanded humanity in Lev. 19:2 “to be holy.” Rabbi Solomon Ben Isaac (“Rashi” B.1040-D.1106), the most influential Jewish Bible commentator of the Middle Ages, whose elucidations are widely studied today, explains that “wherever you find boundaries that guard against sexual impropriety, there will you find holiness.”
Today’s advocates of “woke” culture are creating moral chaos as they actively implement several of the curses against which God warned us. Once “freedom from (not of) religion” became a legal standard enforced by some courts, morality ceased to be based on God’s absolute standards. To fill the vacuum, progressive governmental authorities, together with their “politically correct” allies, chose to become the arbiter of moral values. However, John Adams understood, “We have no government armed with the power … capable of contending with human passions unbridled … by morality and religion.” Further, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.”
Two examples discussed below are illustrative. By implementing these curses, woke advocates are not only weakening America’s cultural fabric. They are hastening the exponential decline of the nation that we’ve witnessed over the past 40 to 50 years.
Faithless Relationships
An illustrative relevant curse is found in Deuteronomy 28:30 where we are told that “Thou shalt betroth a wife, but another man shall lie with her.”
The gradual erosion of age-old moral and legal sanctions surrounding adultery are symptomatic. The Sexual Revolution has radically transformed love into “a splendid experience more magnificent than morality” and sex into an anarchic sport. Cohabitation and casual sex without the benefit of marriage have become prevalent. Neither carries a stigma.
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Divorce is now commonplace. Carrying on of the most private and personal kind, reason not too long ago for shame and elaborate secrecy, are now flaunted. People talk openly and in the media of their own extramarital affairs. They boast of their sexual exploits. Or joke ubiquitously about their fondness for pornographic materials. A new breed of “how to” sex manuals, which unabashedly teach every kind of perversion, are prevalent within society at large and more particularly within the school systems. New movies and every TV season bring a flood of new sexually-oriented material of ever escalating prurience, tastelessness, and violence. All this in an atmosphere of intolerance and hostility towards any legitimate criticism.
Captive Children
Another curse actively pushed by radical left ideologues is found in Deuteronomy 28:32. There the Lord informs us that “Your sons and daughters shall be given unto another people.” In Deuteronomy 28:41 we learn that “You shall have sons and daughters but they shall not be yours, for they shall be taken into captivity.”
We see today a “spiritual captivity.” Children are intentionally estranged from their parents, their faith and their communities. “Sex education programs” throughout the U.S. have swept all educational levels from pre-kindergarten on up. These “sex education” programs have less to do with “education” and more to do with indoctrination against traditional family life. The content of public-school curricula are largely incompatible with the traditional religious principles by which many parents attempt to raise their children.
School systems actively encourage teachers to deny parents any input on what is taught, particularly when the instructional materials relate to gender, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation. Indeed, often without the parents’ full awareness of what is going on, teachers and guidance counselors deliberately choose to misinform parents about what they actually teach.
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The radical left has successfully sexualized many of our children through a myriad of programs both within the public-school systems and the media as well as on the Internet. Examples abound of this abusive sexualization of children. For example, an explosion of “sex change” processes have now become commonplace among defenseless children with virtually no public discussion of their moral, ethical, or religious implications.
This sexual brainwashing of school children is being implemented by direct pressure of teachers’ unions and library boards as well as via legislation. Over the last three or four decades, the progressives have worked tirelessly behind the scenes to proselytize, indoctrinate, and intellectually seduce children through the very public-school systems whose duty it has traditionally been to protect them.
Thus throughout the nation, elementary, middle, and high schools have been transformed into vectors for the corruption of children. Even those children who were either home-schooled or attended private religious schools do not escape. They receive exposure to such progressive agenda-driven curricula and programs at university-level institutions.
Nevertheless, a growing number of young people are realizing the value both of sexual abstention prior to marriage and sexual fidelity during marriage.
Turning Back to Him
Such encouraging signs indicate that it is possible to reverse these and other curses presently prevalent within our culture. Ordinary citizens are expressing outrage.
Parents throughout the country are actively organizing politically and filing lawsuits. In spite of efforts by the FBI to investigate such parents as “domestic terrorists,” parents continue to fight. They are taking on an establishment that attempts to teach students what to think, rather than how to think.
Other signs that the left-wing agenda is meeting opposition can be seen in the increasing number of ex-gay and detransition movements that are gaining adherents and also recent Supreme Court decisions recognizing the freedom to practice one’s religious principles.
Our nation needs to aggressively work to reverse the direction of our culture and overcome both the sins of sexual promiscuity and the effort to pollute the minds of our youth. The blessings promised by God may be restored. There is biblical precedent for such renewal. Ezra and Nehemiah were called by God to restore his kingdom in the midst of an environment that was partially hostile. When they did so, they realized God’s plans for the sanctification of humanity.
Deuteronomy 30:1-3 explains “when you and your children return to the Lord our God and obey him with all your heart… and soul, then ….God will restore your fortunes.”
Arthur Goldberg was Co-Director of the American based Jewish Institute for Global Awareness (JIFGA). He has authored Light in the Closet: Torah, Homosexuality, and the Power to Change. You can contact him at [email protected].
Reprinted with permission.