#759 The Spirit of New Things: Pope Leo XIII, John Paul II, and the Battle for the Human Person

So you get a really understanding of how solid this formation is, where it all began and where did it all begin? You know, since I was a young man, I had faith in the United States that we had enough faithful, morally decent people that would hold up the core of our country.

But then the alarm bells started to go off, and I started to read Pew reports that we had crossed the 50% line of people who belonged to and attended a church, and it went under 50% that were attending church on a weekly basis.

I knew when that happened that the dominoes would begin falling on our country.

Freedom would be taken away from us.

Look, I'm a student of history, and I've seen this happen over and over again.

I'm a student of the Gospels, and I understand what goes on.

We're in a real spiritual battle, and when that happened, I realized, ooh, you know, we're taking too much for granted.

I knew that the dominoes would begin to fall.

Freedom would start to be taken away from us, which was already happening years ago, but it would start to accelerate.

Evil would begin to reign in our country because it starts to reign in the individual human hearts.

We allowed God then to be taken out of our culture.

We see that.

And this is going back already when I was still in school.

And then the teaching of Jesus Christ were watered down even in our churches.

And then as the faith was no longer being passed down from generation to generation within our homes, within our churches, God was basically taken out of our hearts.

And in the past decade then, I saw this acceleration in the United States, the most powerful and prosperous country in the world, in world history.

that had lifted more people all across the world, including my grandparents that came from all different countries out of poverty, out of persecution.

And I saw that begin to crumble.

Was it ever perfect? No.

And you know why? Because it's a country made up of people and people aren't perfect.

but it's also a country for the first time in history that based its whole foundation and its whole foundational principles, its laws on Judeo-Christian principles, bringing God into our hearts, into our families, into our culture then.

And we were patriots, huh? We loved our country.

Did everybody have faith in God? No, not all, but most, certainly enough did, to base the country on under God, and so God protected us.

Not without pain and struggles throughout our history, but in our sins and in our faults, we grew and strove as a whole to extend basic dignity, human dignity to all of our citizens and around the world too, acknowledging higher moral authority and natural law that governed us.

Small government by the people, for the people, under God, who guaranteed our inalienable rights that nobody could take away from us.