Making Progress Is Righteous; Being Progressive Is Not
Word-Of-The-Day: ‘(1) Return, Israel, to the Lord your God. Your sins have been your downfall! (2) Take words with you and return to the Lord. Say to Him: “Forgive all our sins and receive us graciously, that we may offer the fruit of our lips. (3) Assyria cannot save us; we will not mount warhorses. We will never again say ‘Our gods’ to what our own hands have made, for in you the fatherless find compassion.”’ (Hosea 14:1-3)
Two quotes put our current national situation in perspective. The first is from an unknown author, “We live in a society where homosexuals lecture us on morals, transvestites lecture us on human biology, baby killers lecture us on human rights and socialists lecture us on economics.” The second is from Robert Gore, from a ‘blog’ called Straight Line Logic, “Capitalism and freedom didn’t fail the people, the people failed capitalism and freedom.” Both are true, and both are the result of America’s single-most failure; we as a nation have been turning away from God since the early 1900’s, in the name of ‘progressivism’. Progressive politics, progressive education, and progressive social trends – away from foundational standards like the Bible and the US Constitution – all have landed us where we are at now.
Why is progressivism so bad? Don’t we want to ‘progress’ forward? The answer to the latter question is of course we want to make progress, and we did without ‘progressive’ policies. From the birth of the Constitutional United States in 1791 (when George Washington was sworn in as our first President, and the First Congress was seated under the Constitution) until 1913, the US grew into a Blessed nation thanks to the freedom to develop new technologies by individuals who could use their resources (like money, time and skills) to focus on solving problems. Eli Whitney and the cotton gin, Robert Fulton and the steamboat, Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, Thomas Edison and the light bulb, and others helped the US surge to prominence with the Industrial Revolution.
The US avoided for the most part foreign interventions as President Washington warned against, except when the US was directly threatened. The US grew from the thirteen East Coast colonies to a nation spanning North America, kick started by Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Louisiana Purchase’ in 1803 and later in the northwestern tip of the continent in 1867 from Secretary of State William Seward’s ‘folly’ in Alaska’s purchase from Russia.
The progressive movement in the US started in the late 1800’s (after European progressivism developed and grew in the mid-1800’s) as a ‘fix’ against the original founders’ philosophical limitations on government power by Constitutional rule. Whereas previously powers not belonging to the Federal government belonged to the states progressives believed that the ills of the US (labor, racism & the aftermath of slavery, education) would be resolved uniformly through Federal actions and not individual state actions. The first ‘progressive’ president was Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt (26th President from 1901-1909) who enforced the Sherman Antitrust Act heavily and formed what would become the Departments of Commerce and Labor, and the bureaucratic Federal Trade Commission. Later, ‘Teddy’ would form the ‘Bull Moose’ party, a 3rd party espousing Progressivism to challenge the Democratic and Republican parties.
These began to regulate the activities of business, initially with good intentions and results but now often retards ingenuity and innovation through overbearing bureaucratic handcuffing. (Try buying a gas can that actually can pour gas today…) In 1913, the Federal Income Tax began (after the ratification of the 16th Amendment), and along with the creation of the Federal Reserve System created the means for the Federal Government to ‘regulate’ and tap into the wealth of the American citizen, providing a financial roadblock for innovation by increasing the need for ‘collectivism’ or the needs for an innovator/inventor to find investors or loans willing to risk their wealth, rather than the individual to have the means to take upon that risk himself.
Political progressivism morphed into social progressivism. Progressivism started with educational standardization, to provide uniform education; the child educated in Florida would have a similar experience to one educated in New York or California. With this standardization (and the good intentions behind it) came to what would become ‘common core’, and move into ‘critical race theory’, the ‘1619’ movement of history revision, and the eventual removal of Scriptural education from public schools (all in the name of fairness).
The removal of Scriptural morality allowed the morality of progressivism into the school system, to where children are now taught there are no absolutes – no God but of their own creation, no gender but of their own desire, no sexual purity but of their own pleasures. Who let this happen? We all did, falling for the ‘good intentions’ of progressivism and the lure of a social utopia created not by God but of man. Hence, we now have the ‘paramount philosophies’ of morality of LGBTQ, the biology of gender fluidity, the rights of abortion and termination of life, and Keynesian economics being taught to our children, and even worse being preached in many pulpits here in the US.
Is progressivism a relatively new problem, or has it been around – does the Bible address why progressivism in terms of societal movement is not Godly? The answer lies within the Book of Hosea. Hosea was the most ‘major’ of the minor prophets of the Old Testament, acting as a prophet of the Lord for approximately 60 years from ~800 to ~740 BC, during the ‘two kingdoms’ of Israel and Judah and possibly through the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians around 740BC. Hosea mostly preached God’s Word in the Northern Kingdom, so it is possible that Hosea’s writings of Chapter 14 were during the Assyrians’ invasion of Israel and Samaria.
Israel (and Judah) are mirrors into what the US is today; initially following God and God-inspired governance, they fell away into a (for their time) progressive desire to reach out to their neighbors, to expand their opportunities, and to be ‘unshackled’ by the precepts of God to pursue their own desires. They developed their own codes for society and morality, which led to the division of the Israelite Kingdom, the repudiation of God’s Word and the escalation of ‘self’; self-desire, self-reliance, self-controlling. This led to sinful desires, worship of false gods, and disobedience toward God and His laws.
Hosea’s plea in Hosea 14:1-2 is the same as John The Baptist’s plea to those who followed him out to the wilderness; ‘Repent!’ Hosea tells the Israelites who would listen to repent, ask for forgiveness, and pray earnestly – pray as if your prayer could be as pleasing to God as a bull sacrifice! To answer what many Israelites were likely thinking, ‘We’ll just welcome our new Assyrian overlords and keep on trucking’, and what many Americans are now thinking about the policies of socialism (and even communism),
Hosea in Hosea 14:3 tells us what we should acknowledge to God and ourselves as truth. Nothing we or others can conjure up here on Earth can ever provide us Salvation, joy, or lasting accomplishment. Once we stop lying to ourselves that we cannot save ourselves or provide lasting joy or accomplishment, we can then turn back to God, repent of our sins and ask for His forgiveness.
The marital relationship of Hosea to his wife Gomer was fashioned to mirror God’s relationship with us. Gomer was promiscuous and was an adulteress who briefly left Hosea to be with other men. This could have very well been a cause for Hosea to kill Gomer (via public stoning); likewise, God had reason to ‘nuke’ Israel off the map (as he did with Sodom and Gomorrah). But Hosea mirrored God in that he did not kill Gomer, but forgave her when she returned to him and asked to be forgiven, so Hosea restored her as his wife. Likewise, when Israel repented of their sins, God restored Israel as His chosen nation, forgiving them for their transgressions.
With Gomer, she had to be redeemed (Hosea paid 15 shekels of silver and about 430 pounds of barley) and there was a time of cleansing, or a period where she could not be intimate with any man (including Hosea) and likewise Hosea could not be intimate with her (Hosea 3:1-3). It was the same with God and Israel; for Israel to be cleansed, it had to go into exile which it did (as did the Southern Kingdom of Judah about 50 years later) before returning to the Promised Land.
The US can repent and return to God, and the Lord will forgive. What we will have to do to be cleansed is not known except it will be just in its actions that we’ve done collectively, and it will be in God’s perfect will to forgive our nation – if we repent and again obey only Him, by choosing not the religion of progressivism but worship of the one true God!
