Speaking to a group of Catholic priests around the year 2010, Cardinal Francis George (1937–2015) said, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.” What profound words!

Cardinal George subsequently explained that he was responding to a question when he gave this spontaneous answer, which was “entirely outside of the current political debate.” And he noted that he “was trying to express in overly dramatic fashion what the complete secularization of our society could bring.” He certainly hit the nail on the head.

A Spiritual Renewal

In my view, speaking as soberly as I can, the picture that Cardinal George painted is entirely plausible, barring one thing and only one thing: a sweeping revival that produces a radical reformation to our society, a spiritual renewal so deep it births a societal awakening. Otherwise, the crash is inevitable. (Of course, if Jesus returns in the next few years, this point will be moot.)

Some may protest that we’ve been here many times before in our history, with doomsayers repeatedly claiming that the end of the world was near. “It’s all over,” they shouted in years past. “America is doomed!” And yet here we are today, decades (or centuries) later, still economically strong, still powerful, still one nation. Perhaps I’m overstating things.

I’ve written extensively on this very subject, giving examples of times past when it appeared that it was all over for America (or at least for the church of America).

Yet the tide turned, God poured out His Spirit, and America marched on. Obviously, the doomsday prophets were wrong. Perhaps my concerns will prove empty too.

America’s Blessed Destiny is not Guaranteed

But here is the threefold, jarring reality: 1) It was powerful revival movements in the past that turned the tide and saved the nation. Nothing less will do so today. 2) In many ways, we have been on a steady moral and spiritual decline since the counterculture revolution of the 1960s. So it really is revival or we die. 3) There is no guarantee that America will not go the way of the Roman Empire, fading into oblivion, or have a fate similar to the USSR, breaking into fragments. (The Soviet Union dissolved into fifteen independent states.) Show me where it is written that this will not happen to our country. Show me the chapter and verse.

After all, if the covenant nation, Israel, could suffer dispersal, exile, and near complete destruction, continuing to exist as a people only because of the sovereign mercy of God, why should we assume that America’s blessed destiny is guaranteed? Again, I tell you: show me the chapter and verse.

Sobering Words

Speaking at the commencement exercises at Harvard University in 1978, the famed Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn brought a sobering word to the graduating class. Describing the horrors of the Communist Revolution, he said, “If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible what was the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: ‘Men had forgotten God; that is why all this has happened.’”

Speaking of America, he said this:

There are telltale symptoms by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, a decline of the arts or a lack of great statesmen. Indeed, sometimes the warnings are quite explicit and concrete. The center of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.

And he uttered these words back in 1978. I shudder to think what he would say if he were alive today. We are, in so many ways, a nation that has forgotten God. To quote once more from this historic speech: “To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.” Could Solzhenitsyn have been any clearer?

Schaeffer’s Post-Christian Nation

Writing eight years earlier, in 1970, Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer spoke plainly of America as a post-Christian nation. Elliot Clark summarized it.

He writes about the reality of historic Christianity becoming the minority in the West, stripped of cultural power and influence. And in this situation, Schaeffer identifies a great danger for evangelicals: taking sides with political elites in order to retain comfort, affluence, and personal peace. In the face of societal chaos and upheaval, Schaeffer doesn’t want Christians to compromise for the sake of short-lived comfort.

In this remarkably prescient work, Schaeffer goes on to predict the inevitable loss of freedoms that will come once the Christian foundations of Western society have finally crumbled. And in response, Schaeffer calls for a kind of culture war — though not the sort of battles we might be imagining. Schaeffer wants a Christian revolution, the kind that looks like spiritual reformation.

What About the Current State of America?

Yet even a Christian thinker as brilliant as Schaeffer might struggle to find the right words to describe the current state of our nation, one in which thirteen-year old girls are encouraged by doctors to have their healthy breasts removed simply because they are temporarily confused about their gender identity; one in which men’s bathrooms on college campuses have tampons, since “men can menstruate” too; one in which you can be banned from social media for “deadnaming” or “misgendering” someone (for example, calling Caitlyn Jenner “Bruce” or referring to him as “he”); one in which music videos saturated with the most profane, graphic, and degrading sexual imagery are watched or downloaded hundreds of millions of times; one in which fentanyl overdoses have become the leading cause of death for adults between eighteen and forty-five; one in which a Christian pastor who made reference to homosexual practice in a sermon fifteen years earlier was disinvited from praying at a presidential inauguration while a gay bishop was invited to offer up special prayers by this same president four years earlier; one in which a major sports team publicly honored an anti-Catholic, Jesus-mocking drag group called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence; one in which we now have more millennial witches than Presbyterians. Need I say more?

What We Need

Journalist and cultural commentator Christopher Rufo said,

The cultural revolution that began a half-century ago, now reflected in a deadening sequence of acronyms — CRT, DEI, ESG, and more — has increasingly become our new official morality. Many conservatives have made an uneasy peace with this transformation of values, even as the culture around them has, in many places, collapsed.

This attitude no longer suffices. It is time to break the loop of 1968. We need a counterrevolution.

He is absolutely right, but I would take this one step further. This counterrevolution must be gospel based. That’s why our only hope is a sweeping national revival that turns into a powerful cultural awakening. It is the purpose of this book to lay out just how this can be done, all by the empowerment, grace, and guidance of the Lord.

The above is an excerpt from Dr. Brown’s book, Turn the Tide: How to Ignite a Cultural Awakening (2024). It has been republished with permission.

Dr. Michael Brown is the host of the nationally syndicated Line of Fire radio program. He is the author of more than 40 books, including Can You be Gay and Christian?; Our Hands Are Stained With Blood; and Seize the Moment: How to Fuel the Fires of Revival. You can connect with him on Facebook, X, or YouTube.