In a Friday piece in The American Thinker (‘The Real Climate Agenda’), Robert Ferguson uses the details of a 1973 plane crash in the Florida Everglades as a metaphor to highlight how specious alarmism about climate change is distracting us from the utter ruin being foisted upon this country by its current leaders.

I agree with virtually all of it.

Yet one phase seems emblematic of an attitude which I shared until very recently, and from which I have been pried only very reluctantly by the Holy Spirit. I would submit that it is even more dangerous than what he (correctly) describes.

“Americanism,” Ferguson writes, is “our birthright, the only true hope of this planet’s peoples,” concluding: “It is time to become angry.”

No it’s not. (I’ll expand on that in a moment. It applies three ways.)

Americanism (which I’ll take to mean the principles upon which this country was founded) is a blessing conferred by G-d. Why? I could simply say: because He chose to confer it and that would be enough. No one can earn it. Yet it may have been related to the fact that those founders, and the principles they laid out referenced Him — explicitly, humbly and reverently — in a new and unique way. That link was perhaps not quite as universal or wholehearted as some might like to hagiographically imply (no man has ever achieved that except Jesus) but the ‘under G-d’ idea was widely accepted for several centuries on these shores, more or less.

G-d has blessed America. He has used it to His larger purposes. As a side effect of that, we have enjoyed certain fruits as well as carrying the burden of certain responsibilities. I don’t claim to know how that equation nets out now, or how it has changed, but I do sense that it became unbalanced some time ago (forty years? twenty? ten? one?) and that G-d has been enormously patient with us in the meantime. We took our eyes off Him. We now bear the weight of his impending judgment on us.

Please hear me out. Do not conflate or confuse what I say with similar-sounding items such as Reverend Wright’s noxious “G-d d-mn America” epithet. Mine is not an arrogant, bitter directive. It is an observation — and a plaintive cry for repentance.

Americanism is not our “birthright”. It is our responsibility to maintain. (I strongly suspect Ferguson and I would agree on that and so I don’t want to make too much of one sentence, but it’s a vitally important one). Rolled up in that is a responsibility to maintain the blessed relationship with the One who blessed us in the first place. In ways both small and large, we have failed to do that.

Americanism is not our “birthright” when it gets twisted into a right to kill the unborn en masse and have the coffers of harlot Babylon pay for it. It is not our “birthright” above and outside of the one who gives each of us life and breath second-to-second. It is not our “birthright” just because we happened to have been born on a particular piece of land whereas God saw fit to have some other person, such as Mother Theresa, be born in Albania and live out her life in India.

Americanism is not the “only true hope of this planet’s peoples”. Oh don’t even get me started on this one. Americanism has, without question, been the vehicle for hope, and a blessed beacon to millions, perhaps billions during some exceedingly dark times and in some exceedingly dark places. Without America, the world would be a much worse place. Many on the left forget this and it is shameful.

Yet despite my love for this country and my nostalgia for Ronald Reagan and his courage in standing up to the evils of Communism, we must not begin to imagine that it is our light that shines on the hill when it is, in fact, the light of the one who built the hill that has been shining through us. We have, more and more, denied that light and tried to block it and thus it is no mystery that we seem to be growing dimmer and the world darker. As more and more antichrist sentiment seeps into our communal life, we descend into twilight.

If Americanism were “the only true hope of this planet’s peoples”, then I pity the planet’s peoples. I love what America has stood for and what its founding documents still say that it does. I love the spirit of so many — here and elsewhere — that still pine for those things and who feel confused and hurt at their having been snatched away. I love God more.

We should be hoping and praying for more than Americanism. Much more. God is bigger than America and any notion of Americanism. He made them and us — for a purpose and for a time, like all nations and peoples. That time may now be ending.

I would agree with Ferguson that Americanism may be the best this world has to offer when compared to the alternatives throughout history. But we cannot forget: He created it and us. If we turn back to Him in sackcloth and ashes, He will provide abundantly more than what our material wealth, our armies, our sense of generosity and our desire for justice and fairness have delivered to and through us so far.

Those are just attempts to replicate here the riches He has promised to bestow on those who look to His Son and acknowledge his expensive blood sacrifice for us.

So no, it is not the time for us to get angry. It is time for us to ask, on our knees, why God is angry with us and to humbly acknowledge that He has ample reason in each day in every one of us. The miracle is that, in His Mercy, He has held back so long when we have expressed less and less love for His precious gift on the cross.