Growing up American, I had a hard life of soft living, let me tell you. I went to work part time. I went to school full-time. And I attended church every Sunday on schedule. Like any good person, brought up as a product of western civilization, I believed in a Jesus of a sort and held to religion as it is called, but with all the self assurance of modern Christians, I was living like dead leather, shiny and cool with a religious face... And not else but doomed enthusiasm. For me, faith was easy because it required little of me. Attend the weekly bless-me parties and ponder vast-and-shallow philosophies, but never think on more than matters of the mortal world. Yes, that short-lived religion I was raised on offered me much in the way of Edenic Potential but proved itself only the pursuit of false piety and a tragic waste of truth.

While western civilization has done wonders for the world, and we would never wish away our embarrassing excess, our sundry social, economical, and educational, opportunities to excel, if there is a downside to democracy, I would have to say it lies in the space reserved for our faith, a world of watered-down religion, in which we no longer allow for the belief that excellence matters. We are quite fond of our modernity and make our boast about our founding fathers, but what we forget regrettably are the risks they faced to attain those freedoms we so simply forgo and the rigorous journeys they took to cross the sea to be here and build what we have so carelessly broken asunder. Desiring to do homage to aholy Creator, these great men of the breaking-heart stood indifferent to the world which would not let them worship the King of Heaven they could not see and serve His 'Son' upon the earth as they saw fit. And setting out with a single savage faith, forsaking the ill-made works of man, our pilgrim fathers, lovely and godlike, made their way to American shores unbowed in every storm. And establishing a colony of heaven in a hostile world, they strove with all their might for the gospel-driven-life seeking something of His Cross and leaving so much for us to care for thereafter.

And yet all that these fiery men left to us, we have lost to the lying years or allowed to degenerate into Christianity-and-water. Listening to the apostles of tranquility and following after the prophets of tolerance, in our country we have crafted religion as a higher kind of culture with not but a shallow admiration for the Savior, and our only offering for the lowest and least is a forlorn hope and no more. This vague slush of humanitarian idealism, being life as we actually live it, holds little of the life giving Cross, much of those lying prophets, and has grown lamentably out of control, grim, and deadly, and free of the True Deity. We have all the religion dying of thirst, and we ourselves are starving beyond the banquet hall.

But it doesn't have to be this way, playing second fiddle to Saints. We were Giants once, tiny gods in a terrible world, before we left our primary allegiance. Till we forgot the hardness of Heaven and the softness of Men, we were making enemies and borrowing trouble, bleeding charity and binding up the testimony, in The Way of His people. Far too long, we've chosen cunning over belief, but we can change if we begin today. If we are willing to exercise the liberty our fathers earned us and to ask for the Old Paths instead, to stop insulting the dead who gave us the American Dream of religious freedom and get back to the martyrs who brought that dream to life, the time will return when the faith of our fathers was burning and we but felt at home in our Father's House, shining in the shadow of a Great Name.

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