Land calls for a spiritual awakening in America

Evangelicals risk a degeneration of ethics if the nation is not steered toward biblical principles, Richard Land told students and faculty attending the April 17 Land Center luncheon. The former president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and current president of Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, N.C., Land spoke on the topic “Are American Christians Facing a New Dark Age?” 

“Without a revival of Bible-centered morality, with particular attention to their impact on American families, the nation risks a decline in spirituality,” Land said. “There must be revival in the United States if the nation will again reflect Judeo-Christian values.”

A Christian ethicist and one of the leading voices of the religious right, Land mixed folksy charm and incisive rhetoric to emphasize his concern for social, moral and ethical stability in today’s world.Christians must fight the good fight, Land said. 

“The powers of this world will wax and wane, but the Kingdom of Christ is forever,” he continued. “Americans like me who came of age in the 1960s have seen many head-snapping mood turns. America could be compared to Britain in the ‘40s—losing, but not lost. And now Americans have lost the culture war for our hearts and souls. Could it be that help will come from above?”

Land asserted that if people apply the Scriptures to the culture, there can be a reformation. Quoting the words of Martin Luther King Jr., he said, “Christians should be thermostats, not thermometers, setting the temperature, defending ethics and freedoms.”

He emphasized the need for Christian-based ethics in Americans’ lives and homes. “Most of our problems today go back to the problem that half of our children grow up without their father,” he said. Allowing divorce to become widespread “is collective societal child abuse.” Churches, he continued, “need to be fathers to the fatherless. We need to step in to fill that void.”

Through no-fault divorce, abortion on demand and the prevalence of out-of-wedlock births, “we’ve made it too easy [for people] to walk away from their problems and responsibilities,” Land said. “… Unless we have a spiritual awakening, it could lead to the disintegration of the United States.” 

Land concluded by reminding his audience that political adversaries are not the enemy. “The enemy is the prince of darkness,” he said. “But we’ve got the wolf bait. We’ve got the Holy Spirit.”