How America Turned from God — And I Watched It Happen
At the end of yesterday’s post I left you with a question — how did we get here? I want to take a swing at answering it, but not the way a professor would. I’ve watched this country change for sixty-four years. I lived through most of it. And I’d bet a good number of you did too, or your parents did, and they told you about it at the kitchen table.
So this isn’t a history lecture. It’s a walk through a story you probably remember at least parts of. And I think if we walk it together, you’ll finish this post and think what I thought when I finally sat down and traced it out on paper: I watched this happen, and now I understand what I was watching.
1962: The Door That Opened
I was a baby when it started. In June of 1962, the Supreme Court ruled in a case called Engel v. Vitale that public schools could no longer lead corporate prayer. One decision. One court. Sixty-four years ago as of this writing.
Now here’s what I want you to notice, and it matters for the whole rest of this series: the church didn’t ask for this. The church didn’t push its way into the government’s business. It was the other way around. The government stepped into a space that had belonged to families and churches since the founding — the space where children were taught to pray with the people around them — and told them they couldn’t do it corporately anymore.
The fruit of that decision showed up fast. Within a few years, school violence began climbing. Test scores began falling. The trajectory of American public education started a decline that has not reversed to this day. I’m not making that up. The numbers are public. Something got removed in 1962, and the evidence that it mattered showed up so quickly it was almost embarrassing.
I don’t think that was a coincidence. And I don’t think a lot of you do either.
The 1960s and 1970s: The Door Stayed Open
By the time I was in school myself, I could still feel the older America — but I could also feel it starting to slip. I grew up in Dallas, which is the buckle of the Bible Belt, so my experience wasn’t the same as somebody growing up in New York or California in the same years. That’s honest. This shift didn’t hit the whole country at the same speed.
Right up until about 1977, we still prayed every morning at school during the announcements. That was normal in my town. Nobody made a fuss about it. Then one year, quietly, we just stopped. There was no big announcement, no fight. It just wasn’t there anymore. Football games kept opening in prayer for a while longer without any pushback at all, but the classrooms had already gone quiet.
What was called liberation in that era was pitched as freedom. Do your own thing. Anything goes. To a kid growing up in it, some of that felt like the culture just opening up. But under the surface, the guardrails were coming down one at a time, and the people taking them down didn’t tell you what they were doing or why.
The 1980s: Relative Truth and Silent Christians
The 1980s is where I lived a lot of this personally.
My own marriage ended in divorce in that decade, and I want to be honest about the mechanics of it because they tell you something about the era. I filled out some forms but I never met the attorney. I wasn’t even in court the day the divorce was finalized. A covenant that was supposed to be for life came apart through paperwork I filled out on my own time. Now, I took marriage seriously — that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that the very process had been redesigned to treat marriage like it wasn’t a covenant at all. Just paperwork. And the culture around me nodded along.
At the same time, being a Christian at work started to feel different. I remember the shift clearly. In the 1970s, being a Christian in Dallas was just the norm. Nobody thought about it. By the mid-1980s, I could feel that being a Christian was becoming something you were expected to keep to yourself. Not fought against yet, just quietly moved to the private column of your life. You can believe what you want on Sunday, but leave it at the door on Monday.
That was the decade absolute truth started to erode. If you’d asked most Americans in 1965 whether right and wrong existed, they would have said yes without thinking. By 1985, that answer was getting more careful. By 1995, it wasn’t safe to assume it anymore.
The 1990s and Early 2000s: My Truth
This is where the story really shifted, and I want to be careful how I say this because I lived through this part with real people I worked with.
The 1990s introduced my truth — the idea that each person gets to decide what is true for them. In the early 2000s, I really started to feel the culture change around this. I want to say something plainly here so nobody misreads what comes next.
Over the years I had several openly gay employees who worked for me. I had no problem with any of them. They were good at what they did. They were good people. I treated them the same as anyone else on my team, and that’s not something I have to walk back to make a theological point.
What shifted in the early 2000s wasn’t people being who they were at work. What shifted was the request. More and more, it wasn’t about being treated equally — it was about being treated as a category that required special accommodation. That is a different thing, and I don’t think most Christians who lived through it have the words for the difference yet.
Leave me alone became affirm me. Those two are not the same, and one of them puts pressure on your conscience in a way the other never did.
2015: Accept My Truth
In June of 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex marriage was constitutionally protected. That night, the White House was lit up in rainbow colors as a public celebration of the ruling.
The next day at work, my boss — who I knew was gay, though he didn’t know that I knew — asked me how upset I was about the ruling. I told him the honest truth. I wasn’t upset about the ruling personally. It didn’t affect my marriage or my faith. What I found unacceptable was the White House lit up in rainbow colors.
Here’s why. For Christians, the rainbow isn’t just pretty light. It’s the sign of the covenant God made with Noah after the flood — the promise that God would never again destroy the earth with water, it’s in Genesis 9. It’s one of the oldest symbols in the Bible. To see it repurposed as the visual signature of a government endorsement of a redefined institution felt like the government reaching directly into the Christian toolbox and taking a sacred symbol to use against Christian conviction.
My boss and I had a real conversation about it. Neither of us walked away hating each other and we are still friends today. But something crossed a line that day, and I knew it.
2020: Silence Isn’t Enough Anymore
By 2020, an email arrived in my work inbox asking all employees to add their preferred pronouns to their email signature and to respect the pronouns others chose for themselves. The expectation was clear: participate.
I didn’t participate. I was never put in a position where I had to call someone by a pronoun that didn’t match their sex, so I never had to make that hard choice. But the direction of the ask was unmistakable. It wasn’t enough anymore to leave people alone. Now you had to affirm.
Let me put the whole trajectory next to itself so you can see it plainly.
In 1962, the government stopped doing something — leading corporate prayer in schools. In 2020, a corporate culture, shaped by decades of government-led moral redefinition, demanded that you affirm something. Those two things are not in the same category. One was subtraction. The other is compulsion. And the distance between them is the story of the last sixty years.
Two Things I Want You to Notice Before You Close the Tab
The first is this: gender ideology is now being taught in public schools as normal and expected. That is not government stepping into a vacuum anymore. That is government stepping directly into the middle of what God assigned to the family — the spiritual and moral formation of children. The lane crossing is complete. And it is causing chaos in young people who were never designed to carry the weight of adults telling them their own bodies are up for negotiation.
The second is even more important, and it’s going to matter for the rest of this series. The church didn’t go political. Read that sentence again. The government assaulted morality and crossed into lanes that God assigned to the family and the church. That is a different story than the one most cultural voices tell about the last sixty years. And you need to see it now, before we go any further.
What Paul Warned Us About
Paul wrote a letter to a young pastor named Timothy about two thousand years ago, and part of what he said reads like a headline from this week:
You should know this, Timothy, that in the last days there will be very difficult times. For people will love only themselves and their money. They will be boastful and proud, scoffing at God, disobedient to their parents, and ungrateful. They will consider nothing sacred. 2 Timothy 3:1-2, NLT
The prophet Isaiah, hundreds of years before Paul, said something short and sharp:
What sorrow for those who say that evil is good and good is evil, that dark is light and light is dark, that bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter. Isaiah 5:20, NLT
Neither one of those men were watching CNN when they wrote those words. They were describing something they knew would come, because they had already seen the pattern.
But Was This an Accident?
Here’s what I keep coming back to, and it’s the question I want you to sit with before the next post. Everything I just walked through — 1962, 1977, 1985, 2015, 2020 — every single step of it moved in the same direction. Not one of those steps moved back the other way. Not one restored what came before. They were consistent and coordinated. They all pointed the same way.
That doesn’t sound like drift. Drift wobbles. This didn’t wobble.
So the question that ought to be sitting in your chest right now is the same one that was sitting in mine when I finally traced it out on paper: was this an accident, or was this engineered?
That’s where we’re going next.
This is the second post in the Start at Home series. If you missed the first one, catch up here: When You Can’t Feel God’s Hope: Start Here.
The Disciple Blueprint Podcast goes deeper on this each week — five short episodes, Monday through Friday, walking through the same material at a slower pace with more of the personal story. Find it on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, YouTube, or iHeartRadio.
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