OPINION:
As I write this column, it is a mere handful of hours after President Biden delivered his 2024 State of the Union address. This was a speech in which the leader of the free world celebrated the death of our babies, the debauchery of our children, and the destruction of our culture. It was a speech that doubled down on disorder and delusion. It was a speech calling for the ongoing destruction of our towns, our cities, and our nation. This was a speech that called evil good and good evil.
In the wake of such wickedness, how should we respond? What can we do? What should we do?
Well, before we do anything, we should pray. And before we pray, we should understand that we are presently lost if God doesn’t forgive us: Forgive us for calling darkness light and light darkness bitter and sweet and bitter, for saying that left is right, and right is wrong, that true is false, and falsehood is true.
Forgive us for sacrificing our babies on the altar of our convenience and careers.
Forgive us for destroying our schools and for teaching our children sexual promiscuity more effectively than we teach them sexual restraint and self-esteem better than we have taught science and civics.
Forgive us for diminishing the value of marital fidelity and leaving our children clueless as to how to defend the definition of marriage.
Forgive us for teaching the generation that follows us to believe it has the authority to define life for the generation that follows it.
Forgive us for telling our progeny that “choice” gives them the power to take away the right of the weakest to choose.
Forgive us for elevating our comfort over character and money over morality.
Forgive us for our narcissism: For proclaiming we are “as God”; that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for and that we are the change we seek.”
Forgive us for making justice unjust and injustice just, for celebrating lies rather than pursuing truth, for our self-refuting duplicity of pedantically preaching that the tolerant do not tolerate those they find intolerable, and for the hypocrisy of hating those we find hateful.
Forgive us for dumbing down the definition of the imago Dei to the imago dog, for acting as if our identity is little more than the sum total of our base inclinations, appetites, and desires.
Forgive us for pretending to be pro-woman but then subjugating women to the delusional and dysphoric passions of men.
Forgive us for teaching our young women to accept this insult to their dignity.
Forgive us for boasting of freedom while living in bondage to our own sin and deception.
Forgive us for separating the head from the heart and fact from faith, for severing belief from behavior and religion from reason, for “removing the organ and demanding the function”— for creating “men without chests”—for the foolishness of “gelding the stallion and bidding him be fruitful.”
Forgive us for confusing liberty with license and freedom with fascism, for worshiping government more than God, and for trusting in Caesar more than Christ.
Forgive us for thinking we can win the battle for our country’s soul on anything but the penitent knees of the Church.
“God, you have told us that if your people humble themselves, seek your face, and repent, you will hear us and heal us. You have also told us that if we confess our sins, you are faithful and just and that you will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. God, we bow before you today. We are humble. We repent. Please hear our prayer. Please forgive us. Forgive us for acting like we are God and pretending you are not. Forgive us for the disaster we have left our children. We ask that you rescue them from the ugly hell of our own making. We petition you to grant a reprieve of your judgment. We ask that you protect our sons and daughters from the consequences of our arrogance and pride. Please save us from the slavery of our lies and grant us freedom in your truth. In the name of Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, please forgive us for what we’ve done to the nation you have given us. Please forgive us for destroying the United States of America. Please, Lord, we humbly plead, let your kingdom come, and you will be done here on earth as it is in heaven. Amen and Amen.”
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host.
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