Os Guinness - Zero Hour America: Historys Ultimatum over Freedom and the Answer We Must Give

InterVarsity Press
P.O. Box 1400 | Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426

2022 by Os Guinness

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DOM

And to John Brandon, Troy Griepp,
Dick Ohman, and Ryon Paton,

Four friends, one faith, undying gratitude.

The accurate knowledge of what has happened will be useful because according to human probability similar things will happen again.

The knowledge gained from the study of true history is the best of all educations for practical life. For it is history and history alone which, without involving us in actual danger, will mature our judgment and prepare us to take right views, whatever may be the crisis or posture of affairs.

To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be a child forever.

What experience and history teaches us is thisthat people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

God of our father, known of old,

Lord of our far-flung battle line,

Beneath whose awful hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine

Lord God of hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget, lest we forget....

Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forgetlest we forget!

Alexander the Great remarked that the people of Asia were slaves because they had not learned to pronounce the word No. Let that not be the epitaph of the English speaking peoples.

Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.

H OWL, AMERICA! HOWL! Howl like the Hebrew prophets howled over the fate of their people before the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC! Howl like Allen Ginsberg, the radical poet of the Beat generation, howled for the best minds of his generation, destroyed by madness in the 1950s! Howl for the way the fabled land of the free has turned its back on what made it free and is pursuing phantoms that lead to decline and ruin. Howl for how America has come to be what the world sees todaya world superpower still, wealthy, prosperous, and powerful but unrecognizable in terms of the ideals of its past and stumbling leaderless from one blunder to another. Howl for the way America is blindly ignoring its day of reckoning and opting for its own decline, careless about what it would take to avert it. Howl for the way a society fostering so much hate between its citizens appears to be yearning for its own destruction.

Have Americans forgotten their great why? The thousand and one ways their ancestors were not free elsewhere and the distinctive way that they were to live as a free people in the land of the freewith an ordered freedom born of freely chosen consent, a mutually binding pledge, and reciprocal responsibility of all for all? Not simply a democracy but a covenantal-constitutional republic that would witness to the world a better way of demonstrating human dignity, justice, freedom, and peace? Have Americans failed to realize that in choosing to be one nation under God they chose to be always accountable and always under the judgment of heaven for their deeds? Is Americas stunning incomprehension about the present crisis the result of a blindness that is spiritual as well as intellectual?

America today makes no pretense of standing for the great experiment in freedom of its first president or the ordered freedom of the republic of its forebears and founders. America can no longer be called a shining city on a hill, an asylum for humanity, an almost chosen people, the last best hope of earth or an empire of liberty, let alone a people living under God and standing before the bar of history. Most Americans show little evidence that they understand freedom and the commitments that freedom requires of them. America now stands uncertainly, stunned and bemused through its ignorance of its enemies without and its enemies within. Americas conscience is battered. Americas public life is torn between the guilt of a sullied past, the pull of a power-hungry establishment oligarchy, and the countering pull of a radical left-wing revolution that has never worked anywhere or at any time, and that has always ended in failure and oppression. America after two and a half centuries has grown into a wealthy, elitist, technocratic, bureaucratic, and corporatist world power that alternately suppresses and squanders freedom with a prodigal carelessness that defies all reasonand despite all this still seems largely unaware of the deadliest peril it faces.

Is this how you Americans repay your ancestors, or is this heavens judgment for all the sins and cynicism through which you have flouted or fallen short of your ideals over the years? Is this how you follow the intrepid men and women who braved the ocean in search of freedom? The patriots who staked their lives and fortunes on independence? The far-sighted band of leaders and thinkers who devised the ingenious ordering of constitutional freedom? The champions of justice and civil rights who addressed the monumental evils and hypocrisies of slavery that contradicted your ideals and hideously scarred your land? The generations who gave their lives for the freedom of others around the world and those they loved at home? The numberless unknown citizens who lived with dignity and decency and made it possible for you to live comfortably as Americans live today?