The moral remedy for America

Pascal, Luther, and the Moral Remedy for America

America’s Judeo-Christian heritage and Bible-based culture have been squandered over the last 100 years or so; what remains today is little more than a residue - a faint trace of the Fear of God-morality that once established Western civilization.

Unfortunately for the nation, the truth of Proverbs 14:34 remains unaltered: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” The same divine principle applies as surely to individuals as it does to civilizations.

In early America, American Exceptionalism sprang from a covenant people shaped by Scripture. Christianity formed good men, good men formed a good state, and together they cultivated an exceptional culture anchored in divine truth. Modern America, to its future regret, has carelessly frittered away that sacred trust.

Blaise Pascal [1623-1662] captured this moral order when he wrote in Pensées 2.183: “There must be a fixed point in order to judge.” A French prodigy - mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Christian apologist - his genius spanned both the scientific and spiritual realms. He made early contributions to geometry and probability theory, invented one of the first mechanical calculators [the Pascaline], and helped establish the laws of fluid dynamics and pressure [the Pascal unit bears his name].

Yet it was his profound spiritual awakening in 1654 - his famous Night of Fire - that marked his encounter with the personal, covenantal God of Scripture and transformed him from a scientist of reason into a theologian of revelation. His unfinished Pensées [“Thoughts”] remains one of the greatest works of moral and religious philosophy in Western literature.

Pascal’s central insight was that man is both great and wretched - great because he was made in the image of God, and wretched because of his fallen Adamic nature. Of Christ he wrote, “There is enough light for those who desire to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.”

His influence reached far beyond 17th-century France. His moral realism, rooted in Scripture, shaped his conviction that humanity is both noble and fallen, capable of virtue yet inclined toward vice. That same truth came to define the worldview that guided colonial America. The Puritans, steeped in the Bible and mindful of man’s corruption, shared Pascal’s anthropology: liberty cannot exist apart from virtue, nor virtue apart from faith.

Modern America has largely forgotten what Pascal and the Founders knew instinctively: that a just society must account for humanity’s fallen nature. For this reason, the Founders established a system of separated powers and mutual checks and balances - an institutional acknowledgment of the limits of human virtue.

Pascal’s warning is prophetic for our age, for the modern world has inverted the moral order of a nation once “founded for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith” [Mayflower Compact].

For instance, Hebrew scholar Michael V. Fox notes that James L. Kugel correctly discerned that the union of beauty and folly in Proverbs does not render them equal: “On the contrary,” Kugel wrote, “the woman’s physical beauty ends up being submerged and overwhelmed by something much bigger - a dirty, sloppy wallowing: it becomes a small detail, an insignificant little glint of gold quite lost in, or dwarfed by, her piggish behavior.”

Where Pascal saw man as fallen yet redeemable, modern culture insists that man is good as well as sufficient unto himself. The result is moral confusion on a civilizational scale. If the nation is to endure, its leaders must rediscover the chart and compass once used by the Founders to steer the Republic toward freedom and liberty.

In our own day, the cultural momentum has shifted away from the Biblically based foundation that undergirded early America, and Pascal’s “fixed point” has been lost. The rise of transgender ideology, DEI orthodoxy, the normalization of homosexuality, and the extinguishing of unborn life all vividly illustrate secularism’s downward drift into degeneration.

Contemporary American culture resembles the man in Proverbs 13:7 who “makes himself rich, yet has nothing.” Under the spell of secular education theories, the deluded think themselves wise and wealthy, yet do not perceive their poverty - a poverty of moral knowledge, not of mind.

With that said, what is the spiritual remedy for America?

It begins with a return of the Word of God to public education - the very foundation prescribed by the American Founders. Germany, for example, underwent a transformation in the early 16th century through the power of the Word, as Martin Luther [1483-1546] translated the New Testament from Greek into German in 1522 and the Old Testament [Tanakh] from Hebrew into German in 1534.

Those translations ignited the Protestant Reformation and, in turn, “transformed traditional Western moral and legal philosophy by making not reason but the Bible- and more particularly the Ten Commandments - the basic source and summary of natural law.”¹

It was during Luther’s study of the Book of Romans that his own heart was set aflame. As he lectured on that epistle, he wrote, “I grasped that the righteousness of God is that righteousness by which, through grace and sheer mercy, He justifies us by faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.” That discovery changed the face of Europe and transformed Western civilization.²

The secular creed that man is inherently good and self-sufficient has produced the very chaos it promised to cure, resulting in law without justice, liberty without restraint, and equality without virtue. Contemporary culture is the public manifestation of the false religion embraced by American Christianity over the last 100 years.

Thankfully, and right on time, Gideons and Rahabs have entered America’s public square.

David Lane

American Renewal Project

1. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition; 2006.

2. D. Stuart Briscoe, The Communicator’s Commentary: Romans; 1982.