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When certain families raise their children in today’s culture to be God-honoring, productive, respectful young adults, it’s an astounding accomplishment.

It still happens, praise God, and many of you are still trying to do this.

But the forces allied against such happy outcomes are growing, metastasizing through the disease of secular American culture.

To keep protecting our children, we must recognize honestly what’s going on, even if it is a deeply sobering, heartbreaking picture.

It’s all-out war, one that God is possibly allowing for a time as part of judgment on America.

The left calls the transformation of America “progress.”

But no, it is instead an insane race toward the crumbling temples of ancient barbarism, leading our children by the hand as the sacrificial victims brought willingly to the pagan feast.

Can God “turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children”? (Malachi 4:6)

It may be a divine consequence, if not judgment, of America’s callous slaughter of 60 million unborn lives. God has a habit of giving us what we want.

We are reaping the fruit of abortion: marriage abolition via the homosexual and gender confusion agendas. “Don’t want the blessing of faithful husband/wife love – new human life? OK, take the emptiness of fruitless pleasure instead.”

Sexual promiscuity and cohabitation before marriage were just the beginning. The severe spiritual disorientation that results in the disintegration of male and female norms is being visited on the next generation as we fail to guard their hearts, their eyes, their bodies.

Corruption is “cool”; protectiveness is stifling. The bar of “education” in sexual matters is moved ever lower until Ph.D.s in anti-Christ mythology are dragging youth through a gutter of horrific abominations in grade school. Students are tutored in masturbation as a child, then mutual masturbation as a pre-teen, then experimentation in all directions as a teen. Abortion is always a “health care” option.

And sometimes, adults break a sacred trust and violate children themselves.

The result? More children who exhibit the classic signs of demonic oppression.

Many are behaviorally unhinged, some unaccountably anxious. Others are perennially dissatisfied, proudly rebellious, even self-destructive through cutting, drug use, eating disorders. And then there are those with violent impulses – teen rapists, looters, vandals.

Gender anarchy is one of the last stops on this nightmare trail, a natural outcome of rejecting the sanity and beauty of male and female God-designed identities. Homosexuality was the stop before. And while homosexual desires arise from some level of gender confusion, many stop short of a complete repudiation of the anatomical reality of masculinity and femininity. Or at least, they used to.

Satan is not done with our precious sons and daughters yet. He wants us to hand our children over willingly, believing it’s for their own good, and scream in outrage at any who try to issue warnings.

It’s now “cruel” not to let boys dress in skirts and eyeliner and disrobe in the female locker rooms at school.

Watching this descent into the hell of child corruption for four decades, it’s difficult to understand why more people who call themselves Christian are not radically upset. Some are – that’s our hope and promise.

But for instance, America’s most fervent pro-life activists often avoid any stand on this issue. It may be fear, or it may be that they resist connecting the dots about where decades of sowing disrespect for the fruit of marriage takes us.

After killing millions of our own offspring, Americans are jaded and desensitized to the sexual corruption of our children. Many believers now contend, unbiblically, that it’s un-Christian not to cooperate with these diabolical delusions.

This blindness may also be God’s judgment.

We are more afraid of the worldly label of “hate” than the divine label of “unfaithful.”

Parents allow schools to teach children detailed elements of sexual perversion in sex education. Should 11-year-olds learn, inaccurately, that anal sex is a manageable “genital” activity? Do we not weep in despair at the smashed innocence in a sensitive child?

Friendly librarians hand our children “young adult” literature selections that include pornographic passages. Parents trust that what a school recommends will have no negative effect. This category of literature has exploded in the last 15 years – complete with rape scenes, homosexual sex, masturbation, oral sex, gender fluidity – only because parents are not the watchdogs they used to be. The healthy skepticism that once accompanied parental oversight is quickly vanishing.

So we have porn-obsessed boys who crave sex with other boys – but are willing to accept sex with a predatory adult male.

We see teen lesbians who hate males flirt with witchcraft and think abortion is a sacrament.

And highly disturbed middle schoolers are exploited by social media and radical teachers and threaten suicide unless parents support them in identifying as the opposite sex and beginning hormone “treatment.”

Does any parent bring a baby home from the hospital and proclaim, “Oh, I can’t wait until he is a 17-year-old drag queen who begs to have castration surgery!”

Do any parents pray that their adorable baby girl grows into a foul-mouthed, tattooed “gender-queer” who damages her breasts permanently through chest-binding?

Of course not. America is drowning in parental tears. “I never thought this would happen!” “What did I do wrong?”

Sometimes parents do bear some responsibility. But sometimes it’s the corrupt world that is increasingly impossible to screen out.

We must change it.

What can America do to turn this around? First, we must face the war that is being waged and search our own hearts, with repentance and conviction.

Read and study Scripture about the nation that turns from the Lord:

"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.
Because you have rejected knowledge,
I will also reject you from being priest for Me.
Because you have forgotten the law of your God,
I also will forget your children." ( Hosea 4: 6, NKJV)

Can we save our children? Yes. But first, we must save ourselves.

In 1945, George Orwell penned “Animal Farm.” One of his characters was Squealer the pig, who arbitrarily redefined words so that they would mean what he wanted. As Orwell explained about Squealer, “he could turn black into white” as part of his attempt to get the other animals to accept his message. It appears that secular progressives are the modern Squealer.

According to them, Donald Trump has now shown us who he really is: a theocrat. Never mind that leading up to the election, we were all fed a steady diet of how irreligious he was. That doesn’t matter anymore. Now he’s a theocrat!

Ironically, they don’t even call the pope a theocrat, and especially not their Shariah supremacist friends seeking to install a global caliphate. The term “theocrat!” is so repulsive that it is reserved solely for Donald Trump and those who support him.

They are so repulsed by traditional religion that they exploded in derision after first lady Melania Trump recited the Lord’s Prayer at a rally in Florida. And then when a public meeting in Louisiana was opened with prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance, the invocation was repeatedly interrupted with vocal outbursts and heckling. All of this was nauseating to them, but then – horror of horrors! – Trump promised to restore constitutional protections for the rights of religious conscience and to level the political playing field to allow people of faith to have the same constitutional free-speech rights secular folks have. That announcement was so terrifying it caused a Washington Post columnist to warn the nation that “Much-dreaded ‘Shariah law,’ or something resembling it, may well be coming to the United States.” Wow.

Let’s see if I get this right: If you want to restore the constitutional free-speech rights of all citizens, including pastors (rights unconstitutionally removed by Sen. Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1954), and if you want to protect the constitutional rights of religious conscience (which, historically speaking, is America’s first-protected, most-important and longest-cherished politically protected right), then you are establishing a “theocracy”?

To quote a famous line from Inigo Montoya in the popular movie “Princess Bride:” “You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.”

I understand that it might be difficult for secular progressives to know the meaning of a word as simple as “theocracy.” Most of them probably went first to public school and then attended an “elite” academic college afterward, and study after study affirms that most of those who attend such institutions no longer receive even a rudimentary knowledge of basic historical facts (and they certainly don’t get much logic or common sense).

So just for clarity, here’s the simple definition of “theocracy”:

“A system of government in which priests rule in the name of God, or a god.” (Oxford Dictionary)

“A form of government [with] the God’s or deity’s laws being interpreted by the ecclesiastical authorities.” “A system of government by priests claiming a divine commission.” (dictionary.com)

“Government ruled by — religious authority.” (American Heritage Dictionary)

Do they really believe that Trump is a priest, or an ecclesiastical authority? How silly! And a theocracy also uses coercion and force to enforce its beliefs and dogmas. Furthermore, it excludes input from the people – no elections. So by definition, a constitutional republic with open elections, such as America has, cannot be a theocracy (but let’s not confuse them with something so simple).

However, there is one other important fact secular progressives ignore: Just as religion can be the basis of a theocracy, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, so, too, can non-religion. Back in 1965, the court held (and reiterated many times since) that all that is required to be a “religion” is “whether a given belief that is sincere and meaningful occupies a place in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by the orthodox belief in God.” The court has therefore repeatedly ruled that progressives, humanists, Satanists, atheists, evolutionists and other such secularist groups are just as religious as Bible-based groups, and so each of these secularist groups now receives the same religious tax-deductible standing as traditional religious groups.

So, if what Trump believes can represent a theocracy, so, too, can what secular progressives believe. In fact, secular progressives are more likely to be truly theocratic, for they regularly exercise coercion to force dissenters to adopt their beliefs. If you doubt this, just ask the bakers, florists, photographers, clerks, chaplains and others who have tried to avoid participating in the progressives’ religious rites to their great goddess of the Sexual Revolution, whether abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism, or other manifestations of the LGBT agenda. (Significantly, Romans 2:21-23 in the Bible points out that critics are often guilty of the very crimes and shortcomings they accuse others of. That certainly appears to be so in this case.)

So how does the charge of “theocracy!” relate to what Trump and his administration is doing? It doesn’t – unless you are Squealer the pig.