Implosion (3 page)

Why I Wrote This Book

These are not normal times.

Americans have been gripped by a widespread and deeply rooted pessimism in recent years. They are openly asking whether our nation can survive. In the pages ahead, we’ll consider whether such pessimism is reasonable or an unwarranted overreaction to current economic and spiritual trends. Americans have, after all, faced dark times before and overcome them. Then we’ll look at recent events and trends in the light of Bible prophecy. We’ll consider whether we are in the period of history the Bible calls the “last days” and look at which nations and regions of the world are specifically mentioned as key players in End Times prophecies. We’ll then look directly at a central question people are asking—“What happens to America in the last days?”—and examine a range of scenarios Americans could face in the months and years ahead.

Then we’ll take a look back at two remarkable periods in American history. We’ll see how God has blessed this nation in the past with two tremendous spiritual revivals, and we’ll quickly study some of the key human players God used to bring about these periods, known as the First Great Awakening and the Second Great Awakening. And then we will ask two other crucial questions: Given that God has blessed America with such amazing revivals in the past, might he choose to do so once again? Instead of allowing America to implode, might the Lord in his grace and mercy allow us to experience a Third Great Awakening in the years to come?

After some observations and interpretations, we’ll begin to consider some applications. In light of where we are and where we are heading as a country, how should we then live? How should our relationship with God be different from what it is now, if at all? How should our relationships with our parents, our spouses, our children, and our neighbors change? How should our involvement in our churches change? Are we content with the church’s involvement in our society? If so, why? If not, why not? To what extent, if at all, should we be involved in the political process? And how can we keep from losing hope if our nation continues to be shaken and loses her way?

My hope is that you will not only find this book helpful for yourself but that perhaps you’ll share it with a friend and discuss it over a cup of coffee or a pot of tea. Perhaps you’ll decide to study it with your book club or with your small-group Bible study or home fellowship group. Whatever you do, please don’t keep your thoughts to yourself. Engage someone else in this conversation. Listen to what they think. Compare notes. Discuss practical steps you intend to take going forward and how you might encourage one another on the journey.

The stakes are very high. Our nation has come to a critical crossroads. We face the potential implosion of our economy and society. Let us, therefore, engage each other in discussing how we got here, where we are going, and most importantly what the Lord is telling us in his Word to do next.

Time is of the essence.

CHAPTER TWO

AMERICA'S RISING ANXIETY

Most of my focus in the past decade has been on the Middle East.

Given the enormous volatility of the region, its importance to global economic and national security, and its central role in Bible prophecy, I have crisscrossed the region from Morocco and Egypt, to Israel and Jordan, to Iraq and Afghanistan, analyzing and writing about geopolitical, economic, and spiritual trends. In researching and writing my 2009 book,
Inside the Revolution
, I was struck afresh by how deeply radical Islamic leaders—and particularly the leaders of Iran—believe the United States is destined for the ash heap of history and by how often they declare that America's demise is coming quickly. Recall for a moment a few examples:

• “We now predict a black day for America—and the end of the United States as the United States, God willing,” Osama bin Laden famously declared in 1998, a prediction radical Muslims in al Qaeda still work and pray for despite bin Laden's demise.
[12]

• “God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism,” Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted in a highly publicized speech in 2005.
[13]

• “The end of the U.S. will begin in Iraq,” Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei confidently asserted that same year. “One day the U.S. will be history.”
[14]

• “Today, the time for the fall of the satanic power of the United States has come, and the countdown to the annihilation of the emperor of power and wealth has started,” Ahmadinejad said in 2008. “Get ready for a world minus the U.S.”
[15]

• “Not only corrupted and despotic rulers, but the United States and other world powers with an aggressive nature will finally suffer a defeat by nations, and God's promises will come true,” the Ayatollah Khamenei reiterated in 2011.
[16]

• “I am certain that the region will soon witness the collapse of Israel and the U.S.,” Ahmadinejad echoed the same year.
[17]

On and on it goes. By now such sentiments and predictions should not be surprising. The jihadists believed their prayers and efforts led to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now they believe the “godless” American empire is next to fall.

What is surprising, however—stunning, really—is that large segments of American society have also come to believe that the United States is in severe trouble. Not just run-of-the-mill, garden-variety trouble, but real peril. Grave danger. And not just from threats without, such as radical Islam, but from threats within, such as financial ruin and moral decay. Vast numbers of Americans have come to believe we have entered a period of severe and potentially irreversible decline. What's more, many Americans go even further, fearing that the United States is in serious risk of economic and social collapse, not mere decline. Some fear America is following the path of the Roman Empire and wonder if their country is destined for destruction. Their reasoning may have little or nothing to do with that of the Islamic Radicals, but their conclusions seem unnervingly similar.

What's more striking is that these Americans are not limited to a particular political party, religion, socioeconomic status, or region of the country. They don't represent just one sliver or slice of the country. Rather, they increasingly span the full spectrum of partisan, ideological, racial, cultural, and spiritual backgrounds. Were one somehow able to put them all in the same place, they would surely have more disagreements than agreements on how best to solve our country's problems. But they would agree on at least one thing: they all genuinely wonder if we are in jeopardy of witnessing the end of America as we have known her for so long.

What the Polls Are Saying

Public opinion surveys are, to be sure, imperfect barometers of the American mood. Even the most carefully designed and trustworthy polls can provide only momentary glimpses into people's hearts and minds. They represent mere snapshots in time. Still, a review of polling trends over the last decade or so paints a sobering picture of rising American anxiety about the future of our country.

The Gallup organization, for example, routinely asks Americans, “In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?”

In January 2000, at the dawn of a new millennium, we were brimming with optimism. Only 28 percent of Americans said they were dissatisfied with the way things were going in America, while 69 percent of Americans said they were satisfied.
[18]

Eight years later, however, everything had changed. Amid the historic financial crisis on Wall Street in the fall of 2008, the loss of trillions of dollars of personal wealth, millions of layoffs, surging unemployment, soaring home foreclosures, an alarming number of bank failures, and skyrocketing national deficits and federal debt, such optimism had evaporated. By October of that year, a stunning 90 percent of Americans said they were dissatisfied with the situation in America, while a mere 9 percent said they were satisfied. This proved to be the lowest such reading to that point in Gallup's history, the organization noted, adding that “the previous low point for Gallup's measure of satisfaction had been 12 percent, recorded back in 1979, in the midst of rising prices and gas shortages when Jimmy Carter was president.”
[19]

Other polls taken during that period similarly captured the magnitude of Americans' anxiety about the condition of their country and their increasingly deep-rooted pessimism about the future. A remarkable 73 percent of Americans at the time told pollsters they believed the U.S. was in a state of decline, according to an NBC News/
Wall Street Journal
poll.
[20]
What's more, according to an ABC News/
Washington Post
poll, 82 percent of Americans said the country was on the wrong track.
[21]

Over the next several years, those poll numbers ebbed and flowed, but overall the nation remained deeply pessimistic. As businesses continued to shut their doors or lay off employees, more homes were foreclosed, more banks failed, federal spending continued to skyrocket, and the federal deficit and debt exploded to levels never before seen in the entirety of our nation's history, Americans remained deeply anxious about the country's short-term future, to say nothing of our long-term prospects. It was as if Americans felt they were standing in the middle of a frozen lake, far away from the safety of the shore, and they were beginning to hear the ice cracking under their feet. They had not plunged into the bone-chilling waters below—not yet—but they feared a wrong step, a wrong move, could prove fatal.

Consider the following numbers:

• In the spring of 2010, nearly eight in ten Americans said they feared the U.S. economy could collapse entirely.
[22]

• A year later, the same number said they were dissatisfied with what's happening in our country, while only two in ten Americans said they were satisfied.
[23]

• Four in ten Americans in the summer of 2011 said that “the current economic downturn is part of a long-term permanent decline, and the economy will never fully recover.”
[24]

• Nearly half of all Americans feared the U.S. was heading for another Great Depression.
[25]

• At the end of 2011, more than seven in ten Americans said they believed the country was on the wrong track.
[26]

Permanent decline? Economic collapse? Another Great Depression? Do Americans really believe such catastrophic events could happen here? Not all Americans do, of course, but yes, clearly tens of millions of people believe this. And while it's probable that these polls are partly picking up the views of perennial pessimists and congenital hypochondriacs, the data suggest that such fear about the future of our country has become both widespread and mainstream.

What the Pundits Are Saying

Consider, too, what a wide range of political analysts, columnists, social scientists, historians, and other commentators are saying. Not only are Americans across the political spectrum privately contemplating the possibility that the United States may be in a tailspin from which we may not be able to recover, but they are also increasingly feeling compelled to say such things aloud.

• Keith Olbermann, a liberal political commentator, told viewers on MSNBC that we are witnessing “the beginning of the end of America.”
[27]

• Glenn Beck, a conservative political commentator, told his nationwide radio audience that “this is the end of America as you know it.”
[28]

• Al Gore, former vice president of the United States and the Democratic nominee for president in the 2000 campaign, has said he believes that America is in “grave danger” and that the world faces a “planetary emergency.”
[29]

• Charles Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize–winning conservative columnist, told Fox News viewers that “it's midnight in America.”
[30]

• Paul Krugman, a liberal
New York Times
columnist, believes “the American dream is not totally dead, but it's . . . dying pretty fast.”
[31]

• Peggy Noonan, a conservative
Wall Street Journal
columnist, says there is across America “a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed anytime soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with ‘right track' and ‘wrong track' but missing the number of people who think the answer to ‘How are things going in America?' is ‘Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.'”
[32]

• Chalmers Johnson, a late liberal professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, wrote before his death in 2010 that “the capacity for things [in America] to get worse is limitless” and that “Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American republic may be coming to its end.”
[33]

• Thomas Sowell, a conservative professor and economist, observes that “the collapse of a civilization is not just the replacement of rulers or institutions with new rulers and new institutions. It is the destruction of a whole way of life and the painful, and sometimes pathetic, attempts to begin rebuilding amid the ruins. Is that where America is headed? I believe it is. Our only saving grace is that we are not there yet.”
[34]

• Cullen Murphy, the liberal editor of
Vanity Fair
and former editor of
The Atlantic
, asks, “Are we Rome? In a thousand specific ways, the answer is obviously no [but] in a handful of important ways, the answer is certainly yes.”
[35]

• Pat Buchanan, a conservative columnist and former advisor to Presidents Nixon and Reagan, believes that “The United States is strategically overextended worldwide. . . . It is an empire, and the empire is coming down.”
[36]

• David Murrin, an international market strategist and author of a book on the future of the markets, warned viewers on CNBC's
Squawk Box Europe
that the enormous deficit and debt crisis facing the United States was causing him to become very doubtful about America's ability to turn things around. “It's the beginning of the end,” he said, assessing the whole of the American economic and political system.
[37]

• Tom Friedman, a liberal
New York Times
columnist, surmises, “You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we'll look back at the first decade of the twenty-first century—when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornadoes plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced, and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all—and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious . . . ?”
[38]

Yet it is not merely partisans on the Left or Right who are deeply worried about where America is headed. The so-called mainstream media sees the decline of America as mainstream thinking as well.

• A 2009 headline in
U.S. News & World Report
declared: “Nine Signs of America in Decline.”
[39]

• In 2010, Salon.com published a story titled “How America Will Collapse (by 2025): Four Scenarios That Could Spell the End of the United States As We Know It—In the Very Near Future.”
[40]

• In 2011,
Time
published a cover story with the headline “Are America's Best Days Behind Us?”
[41]