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WisconsinChristianNews.com
Volume 26, Issue 5
Love Of God Created the USA
By Jeffrey Ludwig September 2025
that Timothy McVeigh handed a paper with that poem on it to the warden before he received a lethal injection for murdering 167 people in the Oklahoma City bombing. Yet, the vision the poem presents and the similar vision presented by Oprah places too much emphasis on the
that followed for centuries with Catholics and later in Protestant worship in an even purer form, were pushed aside. For Marx, previous forms of morality were merely forms of bour- geois selfishness claiming to be “moral.” Other writers such as John Stuart Mill or Maslow
“If the sins of religions seem to eclipse their merits, chart your own spiritual path for truth and wisdom.” This sentence appears near the end of an article that briefly summarizes the spiritual orientation at Harvard’s Divinity School throughout its history. The words “chart your own spiritual path” highlights the failure of Christian institutions in the USA to offer a universal theology that will inspire and sustain our culture. While intended as a positive and inspiring phrase, the words “chart your own” are em- blematic of the spiritual decline of our country. The spiritual decline is the cause of our moral, political, economic, and cultural decline. In- stead of continuing our adherence to biblical values and worship, we have appropriated too many materialistic goals and turned away from Biblical ethics and following God. When one thinks about charting one’s own spiritual path, Oprah Winfrey’s steadfast adher- ence to the phrase “my truth” comes to mind. Many believe this two-word stamp of approval on one’s self-ordained values shows a respect for the individual that is completely consistent with the American emphasis on freedom and rights. These two words are aligned with those in William Ernest Henley’s poem “Invictus” which states, “I am the master of my ship; I am the captain of my soul.” The poem is such a classic
power of in- dividuals to create their own destiny. American individual- ism has suc- cumbed to a great a de- gree to this understand- ing that the individual is solely re-
were not as hostile to re- ligion as Marx, but came to the conclusion that other institutions and prac- tices were more central for human happiness and positive living.
sponsible for the outcomes of his or her life. In fact, this writer was teaching a class in ethics and showed a brief video where the speaker was extolling Aristotle’s ideal of happiness. The speaker concluded that Aristotle believed that his way led to “flourishing,” and spoke as though “flourishing” was a species of the power of positive thinking (Norman Vincent Peale would have been delighted). However, this writer would say that the resulting so-called happi- ness was more inward and deep than mere pos- itive thinking about ourselves or our lives. “It is not merely a fleeting emotion or sensation but a deep and lasting state of contentment and ful- fillment.”
Mill put forward the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number, and that has been generally accepted as a principle of social policy and a requirement for individual adjustment in Western Civilization. And few would dispute Maslow’s claim that meeting needs is and should be a high priority. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” is being seen by increasing numbers as a motto for selfish individualism where exploitation of others is justified. We see this stigmatizing of our Declaration of Independence and the coun- try’s founders in recent works like A Peoples’ History of the United States by Howard Zinn and The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones. This writer believes that Ms. Jones finds these elevated sayings of the Declaration of Independ- ence and the Founding Fathers as intended to divert from their underlying selfish and ex- ploitative goals. Their spirituality as Christians was all part of a deceptive amalgamation of de- vious, heartless, money-making interests. Although this writer believes that greed was more present in the founding of Virginia than in the founding of New England, we must under- stand that, even in that community of macho adventurers, Holy Scripture was essential to their mindset despite an overemphasis on ma- terial success. They did not come with families like the colonialists in New England. But when they came to Virginia, they built a fort and a church, where they were required to attend multiple services throughout the week even though they were rough and tough male adven- turers. The Puritans came with families, explicitly to set up a Biblical city on a hill that would be a light to the entire world. They befriended the Wampanoag tribe which helped them im- mensely, and they in turn helped the Wampanoags with their struggles against the Pequot tribe. Can anyone alive today even imagine the depth of faith it took to move to the shores of North America in the early 17th century? Can anyone really believe that selfishness alone could keep those people going through the tra- vails of survival that they faced? Were they merely meeting needs, or operating out of “my truth?” Greed alone might have been present at the founding, but it did not alone give them the suc- cess they achieved. And in New England we saw a purity of motive that has never been matched. Though troubled by sin then as hu- mankind always has been, their transcendent beliefs opened the door to the nation that was built and survived. I hope we can revive a more foundational view that man belongs to God, and that self-interest and self-reliance and meeting of needs can never bring us the success that we need and desire.
Thomas Acquinas writing about 1500 years after Aristotle really ap- preciated Aristotle’s analysis, but believed that death introduced sor- row into the life of even a successful Aristotelian, and thus corrupted his idea of happiness. For Acquinas, only Christ and the Roman Catholic Church could eternally sustain the parameters of happiness developed by habits of balance between excess and deficiency that one developed. Making another giant leap forward in time, we can see that the Marxists emphasize meeting of needs thus making a 180 degree turn away from Christianity. in 1859 Marx said, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This principle has been af- firmed by leftists and recently by
moderates as though it were an affirmation of respect for the indi- vidual. The eminent psy- chologist Abraham Maslow in 1943 came out with his hierarchy of needs, a triangular chart where 28 human needs were listed in ascending order in a triangle. Al- though Maslow was not an avowed follower of Marx, he followed Marx regarding the importance of needs being met as deter- mining identity and the development of successful lives. The Aristotelian ideal of a balanced mindset as being deci- sive for a fulfilled and thus happy life, and the Christian ideals
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