for its approval and even public funding , to the insistence that people or institutions — including religious institutions such as Catholic hospitals — who refuse to perform or refer for abortions be made to suffer professional or civic penalties or disabilities .
What is behind all this ? According to Solzhenitsyn , the moral decline of the West has behind it the same factor that produced the horrors of communism , namely this : “ Men have forgotten God .” People worship themselves , deify their own desires , fall into an idolatry of the self , because they have forgotten that there is something — indeed someone — higher . They have forgotten God . And absent faith in God , how can they — how can we — muster the courage to bear bold witness , as Solzhenitsyn himself did , to Christian values in an increasingly hostile culture and world ? How can there be courage in the absence of faith ? Fear is a powerful emotion — a very powerful emotion indeed . Faith alone can overcome it .
When people forget God , when they come to suppose that they don ’ t need Him or His grace and guidance , when they fall into the hubristic error of imagining that they are too smart and sophisticated to believe in Him , a catastrophe always ensues .
This was no novel insight or discovery of Solzhenitsyn ’ s . It is the central teaching and theme of the prophets — all prophets , and not just the biblical ones .
In March of 1863 , another man with a craggy face and a beard spoke to the American people words of critique and prophetic warning of precisely the sort spoken by Solzhenitsyn at Harvard and in his Templeton Address . Abraham Lincoln , reflecting on the catastrophe of the Civil War and on its causes , issued a Proclamation of a National Day of Prayer and Fasting . What he said in that proclamation was , in a sense , echoed by Solzhenitsyn , and we would do well to heed it today . Indeed , we fail to heed it at our mortal peril . Here are Lincoln ’ s words : “ Whereas it is the duty of nations as well as of men , to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God , to confess their sins and transgressions , in humble sorrow , yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon ; and to recognize the sublime truth , announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history , that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord . And , insomuch as we know that , by His divine law , nations like individuals are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world , may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war , which now desolates the land , may be but a punishment , inflicted upon us , for our presumptuous sins , to the needful end of our
“ When people forget God , when they come to suppose that they don ’ t need Him or His grace and guidance . . . a catastrophe always ensues .”
national reformation as a whole People ? We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven . We have been preserved , these many years , in peace and prosperity . We have grown in numbers , wealth , and power , as no other nation has ever grown . But we have forgotten God . We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace , and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us ; and we have vainly imagined , in the deceitfulness of our hearts , that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own . Intoxicated with unbroken success , we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace , too proud to pray to the God that made us !”
It has been 155 years since Lincoln wrote those words . And yet , it is as if he wrote them yesterday and directed them to us today . Yes , as a culture , as a people , we have forgotten God . That is reflected in our laws , in the edicts of our Supreme Court , in our public policies , in our news and entertainment media , in our schools and universities , in our economic and cultural institutions , on the streets of our cities , and even , alas , in many homes . We “ have vainly imagined , in the deceitfulness of our hearts ,” that our “ blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own .” And , as a result , we find ourselves in the condition so accurately and brutally diagnosed by Solzhenitsyn .
But what has been forgotten may be remembered . What has fallen into decay can be renewed . What has been lost can be rediscovered . But for these things to happen , those who remember God and sincerely seek to do His will must look to Him for the grace necessary to be His courageous and faithful witnesses — to be , in the words of another modern prophet , Pope John Paul II , “ signs of contradiction ” to a world that has forgotten God . This , allow me humbly to say , is your mission . You must remember God to a world that has forgotten Him . By the example of your lives , as well as by the words of your mouths , you must be the salt and light that repairs what is broken and points the way to true freedom for those who have fallen into forms of slavery that are all the more abject for masquerading as liberation . ■
Editor ’ s Note : Although , as an organization , Renewanation does not agree that Pope John Paul II was a modern-day prophet , we felt this article was worthy of your reading .
Robert P . George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University .
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