What's Happening to America?

by  James Hefley                                                                                                                                         Vol. VI, No. 8, October 1993

[This article is reprinted from The Indiana Baptist, 31 August 1993, and was written by well known Baptist journalist and writer, Dr. James C. Hefley.]

• Twenty-seven years ago, a coalition of Jews, Protestants, and Catholics placed a stone monument in a Colorado state park, inscribed with the Ten commandments and the declaration, "I AM the Lord thy God." A Colorado court recently ruled that the stone must be removed because it violates the sensitivity of unbelievers.

• Last year the social work department at St. Cloud State University, a tax-supported school in Minnesota, declared, "It is simply not acceptable for [students seeking degrees in social work] to view homosexual people as perverse or as sinners..."

• This year the Florida Department of Health directed three pregnancy counselling centers to stop counselling pregnant women about adoption as alternative to abortion.

These are not isolated actions, but part of an ongoing onslaught by a cultural elite seeking to de-Christianize America. While this is happening, Canaanite-like religions are rushing in to fill the vacuum.

The Pagans of Colorado Springs

On a trip to Glorieta Baptist Assembly in New Mexico, Marti and I stopped for lunch in Colorado Springs. The Saturday Gazette Telegraph had a page-and-a-half feature on the growing Pagan Movement, estimated to number over 250,000 in the U.S. "Pagans," reported writer Steve Rabey, "are people who find God – or the Goddess – in nature and themselves and who participate in rituals designed to honor the cycles of nature and to inspire themselves to live creatively and harmoniously with those cycles."

Rabey noted that one group of Colorado Springs' Pagans called themselves the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans and used the local Unitarian church for their evenings of dancing and drumming. One Pagan woman's car Rabey said, was festooned with bumper stickers proclaiming, "Born Again Pagan" and "The Goddess is Alive and Magic is Afoot."

The religion section of the paper also featured a large ad for an upcoming "Symposium on America the Beautiful." The roster of leaders included Pagan priestess Margot Adler, an assortment of liberal Protestant gurus, and – hold on to your wig, the Rev. Dr. James Dunn from the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs.

With such "food" for thought, we drove on to Glorieta, anticipating a haven of sanity for the coming Home Missions Week.

On Tuesday I took lunch with HMB president Larry Lewis and Los Angeles pastor, Jess Moody, who has a summer home in Glorieta.

A Victory in Missouri

"When I was president of Hannibal-LaGrange College," Larry recalled, "the new state commissioner of education cancelled the state grants which our students had been receiving. For the grants to be reinstated, she said, we'd have to be open to hiring academically qualified atheists and homosexuals as teachers, if they should apply. I told the state board of education, ‘I will not allow bonafide students to be robbed of what is rightly theirs as tax-paying citizens simply because they chose a Christian college.' I called CNN and invited them to do a TV feature on our school and how the department of education had yanked student aid money away from us. After the CNN special aired, the board of education instructed the new commissioner to give our students the grants."

"You were fortunate to be in Missouri," Jess grimaced, "and not in Los Angeles where political correctness reigns."

Harassed by Building Inspectors

Jess told of his battles with L.A. building inspectors, while constructing a new church. "When we started, we thought we had all the necessary permits. The construction was supposed to take eight months. The inspectors stopped us 206 times during the next two-and-a-half years. When we finally asked for a hookup to the water system, the city sent us a bill for $91,000 for the right to do that. We had to meet in a tent, sometimes in 108 degree weather, before they let us move into the finished building. Instead of costing what we had estimated, six-and-one-half million dollars, we ended up spending ten million, and right now we aren't able to make the bank payments on the loan.

"That isn't all," Jess declared. "They've told us we cannot have Sunday evening services because we'll disturb the neighborhood. We're having them anyway," he snorted.

"Why did they single out your church?" I asked.

"They didn't single out our church. They do this to all the churches. Not long ago a newly completed Covenant church had to be torn down because the city wouldn't let them occupy it. When we were finally permitted to move into our building, a city inspector told me, ‘This is the last church that's going to be built in L.A."'

Perils in the L.A. Public School System

"It isn't just churches that are being hit," Jess reported. "A while back we had a lesbian school board chairperson. She's now a city councilwoman. She and a fellow lesbian in the public school system set up a program called Project 10. If, say, a 16-year-old boy is ambivalent about his sexuality, he's interviewed by a counsellor. If he says he's ambivalent, they take him to the gay counselling center, a non-government agency, where gay counsellors will determine if he's gay. The parents are not asked about having their kid taken to be counselled by gays, the school just does it. Nor are parents asked to give permission for kids to study a gay curriculum that indoctrinates young minds in homosexuality at public expense.

"I went on TV to protest this program. Evangelicals, Catholics, Jews, atheists – anybody who had any sense of morality protested. But they went ahead and set it up anyway."

"Jess," I asked, "do you foresee a time when there will be overt persecution of Christians in America?"

"Absolutely!"

Satanism on the March

Later in the week, Marti, a director of the Home Mission Board, and I attended a dinner for HMB board members. Rex Holt, a board member from Central Baptist Church, Jonesboro, Arkansas, asked for prayer. "The Satanists and witches are planning to march by our church next Sunday. Pray that we know how to respond."

At the request of board members, Rex presented some background on Satanist activities in eastern Arkansas. "Back in April, Rick McKinney, the youth minister at 2nd Baptist, West Memphis – that's about 40 miles from Jonesboro – tried to win a teenage Satanist boy known as 'Damien' to Christ. "Damien" – that's the Greek word for demon – happened to come to church when we were having the Lord's Supper. The deacons were going to pass the elements right by him, but he reached up and grabbed a piece of bread, threw it on the floor, and smashed it with his foot. A chill ran through the congregation.

"A few days later, three little boys were found dead and mutilated in West Memphis. It was a classic ritual Satanist murder. Damien and two other high school boys were arrested and charged with the crime. The police found cat skulls all over Damien's house.

"The next thing we knew a guy named Terry Riley opened an occult book store named Magick Moon in Jonesboro. People began protesting against the store. With the murders, the arrest of this Satanist boy and his two friends, and now this occult store for witches and devil worshippers, feelings were running high.

"Riley called in six people from the Midwestern Order of Pagans. They held a public press conference in the Jonesboro Public Li brary and announced a march down the main street of Jonesboro, past our church and five others. The march is set for next Sunday morning, when we'll be at worship. We need your prayers."

I called Rex the next week for a report on his services and the Satanist march.

"I didn't use my prepared message," he said. "I talked to the people for a few minutes and then we went to our knees while the Satanists and witches and their supporters marched past our church. There was an incredible presence of God while we prayed. When our service ended our people walked quietly out the side doors.

"The occult book store operator expected 200 supporters for the march. According to the newspaper, only 60 of his supporters showed up. The paper said about 250 counter demonstrators met them outside our church, shouting Bible verses and ‘Jesus Still Loves You.' Among these folks was the father of one of the little boys who was killed. The police kept order, and nobody was hurt.

"The Satanist shop is still open," Rex noted. "We don't know when the trial of the three teenage boys will take place.

"Monday morning, a big picture of our church was on the front page of the Jonesboro Sun with the witches and Satanists and Christian protestors. When I saw that, I thought: ‘This is the church that Jesus built. Even though the enemy comes in like a flood right up to our doorstep, the gates of hell will not prevail against us.'

"I was hit by the feeling that we are living in a time of national emergency. We've got to repent and pray and be strengthened by His Spirit, if we're going to stand against the forces of Satan."

A Chilling Future for America?

Rex is right. What we're seeing is part of a pattern in a developing battle being waged by an anti-God and no-god cultural elite against Christian believers and others who hold to a biblical value system. Eighty percent of Americans profess some kind of church relationship, yet our nation is being overrun by an autocratic, well-schooled minority that is working to ban prayers from all public meetings and excise all biblical inscriptions from public places, all biblical themes from public debate, and all references to Christianity from American history.

While America is hurtling down the destructive slope of secularism, the reverse appears to be occurring in the nations of the former Soviet Union. Freed from an atheistic dictatorship, Boris Yeltsin and other reform leaders are seeking to undergird their countries with biblical values.

To quote Tennyson, "The old order changeth, yielding place to the new."

The changes in America and the former USSR pose questions which I would not have dared think just 20 years ago:

Will nations once held captive by the most powerful "evil empire" in history, now become havens of Christian liberty?

Will our "land of the free" and "home of the brave" become a totalitarian state, forcing practicing Christians underground, making it necessary for some believers to seek freedom in a former communist land?

We've published a chilling futuristic novel, Escape from America, to show what could happen in our beloved country unless she turns from her present downward course. The author is my longtime friend, Wallace Henley, a former aide in the Nixon White House, now pastor of a Southern Baptist church in Houston. We pray that this book will raise the red flag to Americans before it is too late.