The nation that declared its independence 250 years ago, held together not by government but by a common culture, overwhelmingly Protestant Christian, out of which its Constitution and civic order grew. Part 1 of this series ended by asking whether a republic built for “a moral and religious People,”[1] as John Adams put it, can survive the erosion of that culture to adopt a creed that says diversity is the nation’s greatest strength. This article, Part 2, pivots from our nation’s founding principle to recent history, tracing how that corrosion and corruption happened.
1. John Adams, “Letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts,” in The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, vol. 9 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1854), 229.
As America recently celebrated the Semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, folks whose lives have spanned more than a fifth of our nation’s history recognize a massive cultural shift from just fifty years ago. This essay accounts for how that change took place, from the Liberal fracturing of American Protestantism early in the twentieth century, to the ideological engineering of “Multiculturalism and Diversity” that colonized public education and even Evangelical institutions themselves, to the political ambitions of elected officials whose ignorance of and dislike for the religious presuppositions of founding documents, including the Constitution’s restraints, as an obstacle to grasp for power. The connecting thread is not accidental. It is the story of a nation’s culture being deliberately assaulted, dismantled, and replaced, one institution at a time.
Though the national 250th celebration planned by the Trump Administration significantly outshone the 200th observance under the Ford Administration, which emphasized regional or local celebrations over national ones, the country in 2026 is much less cohesive or enduring than it was in 1976. Today’s unifying national culture, significantly changed since the nation’s founding, is under tremendous stress, with geographically small blue metropolitan areas in sharp ideological conflict with geographically large red areas, due to developing cultural disruptors that were yet nascent in the wake of the Watergate scandal, which put Gerald Ford, the first unelected president, into the White House fifty years ago.
Erosion of America’s Culture Since Its Bicentennial
At the nation’s 200th anniversary, Americans still regularly acknowledged that while the nation consisted of many subcultures reflecting variations on the Christian religious traditions, a dominant American culture held them together within one cohesive nation. Immigrants still assimilated into the broader American civic culture while retaining aspects of their heritage in their homes and extended-family gatherings and events. Even apart from immigration, regional subcultural diversity already existed from the nation’s founding, as European settlers arrived with varied Christian heritages, even within Protestantism. Thus, subcultural diversity coexisted within the common civic framework.
2. Some of the church denominations that Liberalism infected and fractured are: Northern Presbyterian Church, Northern Baptist Convention, Methodist Episcopal Church, Congregational Churches (now part of the United Church of Christ), Episcopal Church, Disciples of Christ (Christian Church), and United Lutheran Church in America (now Evangelical Lutheran Church in America).
Early in the twentieth century, Liberalism fractured America’s large Christian denominations.[2] Liberal defections from core Christian beliefs pushed Evangelicals out to start their own denominations. J. Gresham Machen convincingly showed that Liberalism became a fundamentally different religion, competing with Christianity.[3] Liberalism launched the Social Gospel movement, led by Walter Rauschenbusch, Washington Gladden, Josiah Strong, and Charles M. Sheldon. This movement applied the Liberals’ altered “social gospel” ethics to social and moral issues in response to rapid industrialization. Even so, still dominant at the Bicentennial was the American ideal that the nation was a “melting pot,” popularized by Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting Pot, which portrayed America as the unique place where citizens and immigrants with ancient divisions of race, nationality, and religion could be overcome by gradually fusing all into a common national identity.
3. J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, reprinted 1977, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1923).
Cultural changes gradually began to appear following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, promoted by Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA), which ended restrictions dating back to the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which favored Northern European immigrants and banned non-Christian immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.[4] This Act provided an opportunity for powerful educational policymakers who, over time, significantly altered the public’s readiness to accept immigration policies that ran counter to those in place for earlier generations. The new mindset on immigration led to increased immigration from previously banned non-Christian global areas and annual restrictions of 170,000 visas from the Eastern Hemisphere and 120,000 from the Western. In 1986, because of a large influx of immigrants who arrived in the U.S. illegally, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, granting amnesty to three million immigrants, which gave them legal status, offering a direct pathway to permanent residency and citizenship.
4. For a fuller discussion of this, see John D. Wilsey, “Religious Pluralism, Sharia Supremacy, and the Constitution,” Christ Over All, (July 10, 2026).
America’s Domestic Cultural Enemy, Multiculturalism
5. James A. Banks was a leading voice advocating for what he called “multicultural education.”
In the 1970s, public-school curricula embraced and integrated a totalizing ideology, “Multiculturalism and Diversity,” a worldview subversive to Western culture cloaked innocuously as “multicultural education,” which began to transform the cultural thinking of post-baby-boomer generations.[5] America’s colleges and universities were subjecting students to the same ideology, intensified. Talk of a unified national culture with various subcultures was disappearing from public discourse in favor of diverse communities. Diversophiles and multiculturalists hijacked the word “community” and filled it with their own meaning from identity politics, no longer referring to people within the same neighborhood. By the 1990s, “community” became the dominant word in education, government, and media to identify individual people as members of groups with homogeneous interests or characteristics—African American, Latino, LGBTQ, Muslim—even silly designations such as Intelligence Community, International Community, Air Traffic Control Community, and Community of Learners. Individuality is lost. Multiculturalism paternalistically suppresses real “diversity and reduces everyone to interchangeable beings whose differences we must not learn about—making nonsense of literature and history along the way.”[6]
6. Diane Ravitch, “You Can’t Say That,” The Wall Street Journal (February 13, 2004): 15.
Hence, under multiculturalism’s tyranny, immigration policy became increasingly lax and complex, with each later administration talking about resolving the heavy illegal invasion of undocumented immigrants, leading to increased deportations. During President Barack Obama’s administration, large numbers of Somali Muslims were granted immigration to America, growing to an estimated 260,000, with 80,000 in Minnesota.[7] At the same time, officials deported approximately three million illegal immigrants, with 407,000 in 2012 alone.[8] By way of contrast, no single administration has allowed more illegal immigrant entries than the Biden administration, approximately seven million. Is it any wonder that the United States, like Western European nations, is undergoing rapid and dramatic cultural erosion, aided and abetted by Leftist ideologues, politicians, and their ideologically driven electorate?
7. Joe Hernandez, “How Minnesota Became a Hub for Somali Immigrants in the U.S.” NPR (December 4, 2025).
Thus, before the Bicentennial year, several aggressive culture-altering forces were converging in the wake of the Viet Nam debacle:
8. By comparison, two million were deported under President George W. Bush and 1.2 million during President Donald Trump’s first administration.
- The Watergate affair and the transfer of the presidency from Richard M. Nixon to Gerald R. Ford,
- distrust of authority
- humanistic psychology with its psychotherapeutics of victimization
- public school educators refusing to appear religious or morally sectarian
- situational ethics
- the alleged neutrality in values-clarification instruction
- outcomes-based curricula
- moral relativism
- the Civil Rights Movement
- innocuously portrayed ideological objective of multicultural education
9. Christ Over All devoted a month-long theme to Schaeffer’s book, A Christian Manifesto for the 21st Century.
All these forces conspired to displace the already compromised Western worldview that dominated America’s public education with its own allegedly neutral view of and for the world, which attentive Christians, such as Francis Schaeffer, vigorously countered. He argued in lectures, which became A Christian Manifesto (1981), that Christians could no longer assume that American institutions, especially public schools, operated from a shared biblical moral framework.[9] Flawed ideas, uncritically adopted over many decades, had gradually shifted educational foundations away from the common Christian core on which America was founded.
10. See Charles Sykes and K. L. Billingsley, “How the Ford Foundation Created Multiculturalism,” FrontPage Magazine, (January 9, 2004).
All those culture-altering forces that wreaked havoc on America’s public education during the 1970s and 80s were symptoms of the same underlying development: the intentional erosion of a formerly shared culture rooted in a biblical worldview. This was replaced by philosophical pluralism, relativism, and Cultural Marxism, which hid behind the appeal of virtuous-sounding Multiculturalism, becoming “Multiculturalism and Diversity” in the late 1980s and early 1990s, hardly a spontaneous intellectual development.[10] It is a Marxist agenda arising from the Frankfurt School to eliminate outcome disparities in societies with a doctrine that appeals to paternalistic virtue and condescending righteousness, born of and nurtured by the guilt of privilege, prosperity, and blessing, and which appeals to the baser depravities of its beneficiaries, especially greed and ressentiment (suppressed feelings of envy and hatred).[11] It is a political ideology that simultaneously regards all cultures with their mores and institutions as equal in value while criticizing and vilifying Western culture—heavily shaped by Christianity—as the world’s bogeyman, the source of every form of oppression: racial, ethnic, economic, age, etc. It was not long before “Multiculturalism and Diversity” gave way to the more prominent feature, “Diversity,” with “White” designated the oppressor and “Black” the oppressed. This color code has always been present throughout all the various iterations of Critical Theory’s imposition, whether “Multiculturalism and Diversity,” Diversity, CRT, DEI, Woke, etc.
11. “Multiculturalism and Diversity” has its historical, theoretical, and ideological roots in the Frankfurt School, a school of thought within Marxism whose principal figures were Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. See, e.g., Ardel B. Caneday, “In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit of Diversity: Multiculturalism Goes to College,” Christian Research Journal, 30.3 (2007): 24-33. See also, Ardel B. Caneday, “Evangelicals and the Encroachment of Cultural Marxism,” Center for Cultural Leadership, (August 31, 2018). For a fuller exposé, see Bradley G. Green, What is Critical Theory? A Concise Christian Analysis, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2026). On ressentiment, see the superb discussion by Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society, (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1983), 51-54
Aiders and Abettors of America’s Domestic Cultural Enemy
Even Evangelicals fell prey to Diversity’s seductive siren song. In 1991, the Coalition for Christian Colleges (CCC, now CCCU), headed by Myron Augsburger, pushed through the Racial/Ethnic Diversity Initiative, which adopted the ideological claim that “Coalition schools failed to mirror the ethnic diversity of the surrounding culture.”[12] Some conservative college presidents questioned Augsburger’s aggressive push for “social justice” as “leftward drift” and resisted top-down mandates from the CCCU’s Washington, D.C., office. Nevertheless, the CCCU required every member institution to create a Racial/Ethnic Diversity office on campus to enforce the ideological agenda. Because of the pushback, the CCCU headquarters quietly closed the Office of Racial/Ethnic Diversity in 1994, and Augsburger resigned as president.
12. James A Patterson, Shining Lights: A History of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), 93. The CCC became the Coalition for Christian Colleges and Universities in 1995 and then the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities in 1999.
Diversity advocates at CCCU institutions commonly complained that the greatest faculty resistance came from members within their respective Biblical & Theological Studies Departments. That was certainly true where I served as a professor in that department at our college.[13] From the beginning of my tenure as a faculty member, I regularly critiqued Cultural Marxism’s intrusion onto our campus, exposing the Marxist origins and agenda of the “Multiculturalism and Diversity” movement, with general silence from faculty colleagues, fearing repercussions, and intense and hateful opposition from administrators and those whose employment depended on sustaining the CCCU agenda.[14]
13. Bob Paulson, “Stopping Mission Drift: How Three Christian Universities Refocused on Biblical Truth,” Decision: The Evangelical Voice for Today, (July 10, 2026). This includes a wonderful report on the reversal of the mission drift at University of Northwestern-St. Paul, where I served full-time for twenty-eight years.
Despite its claims, the real objective of “Multiculturalism and Diversity” has never been to engineer society into a kinder, gentler culture where tolerance, sensitivity, and acceptance govern among diverse cultures, but rather to suppress truth and the Christian-shaping of culture. Its “holiness code” of Political Correctness has always been the seductive sweetness that lures the ingenuous and unsuspecting to embrace the promised “salvation,” which is nothing more than a lure that leads them directly into the thought-control snare George Orwell effectively portrayed in the dystopian novel 1984, which many seem to follow as a guidebook for subverting the culture.
14. My faculty appointment at Northwestern College (1992) and the college’s implementation of “Multiculturalism and Diversity” coincided. Hence, my concern about the college’s trajectory. See note 11 above for some of my published articles on the issue.
Multiculturalists, including Evangelical advocates, have thoroughly repudiated the longstanding tradition of assimilation, that America is a “melting pot,” and all without rational argument but by emotional acclaim, assertion, and insistence on uniformity of thought. They have imposed their own clunky and chunky diversity ideology that America is and should always have been regarded as a “tossed salad” consisting of distinct immigrant cultures that do not assimilate with the established host culture. Stated more bluntly, from the beginning, as some of us have long argued and demonstrated, multiculturalists have been aiming at balkanizing America into micro special interest groups by ethnicity, skin color, sexual preference, transsexual fiction, and any and every other imagined and imposed construct. The result of this engineered uniformity of thought is an imposition of diversity that divides by forming numerous miniature nations within the host nation.
Multiculturalists invert assimilation by demanding that the host nation accommodate the rival immigrant culture. Once church bells pealed in cities like Dearborn, MI, and Minneapolis, MN. Now, five times each day, the Muslim call to prayer (Adhan) blasts across these cities, which have adjusted their noise codes to accommodate the annoyance and high decibels.
Politicians’ Ignorance and Dislike of the Founder’s Documents and God
15. “Rush Limbaugh Calls on Conservatives to Take Back Nation,” CNN.
During his radio show on January 16, 2009, four days before inauguration day, Rush Limbaugh explained to his listeners that The Wall Street Journal had requested him to submit 400 words expressing his hopes for the incoming Obama Administration. Limbaugh explained, “I don’t need 400 words to answer this.” He used four words: “I hope he fails.” Of course, Limbaugh explained, “What is so strange about being honest and saying, I want Barack Obama to fail if his mission is to restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation? Why would I want that to succeed?”[15]
16. Jim DeMint, “The President’s Disdain for His Oath,” The Heritage Foundation, (September 17, 2013).
Limbaugh understood what presidential candidate Obama meant when he promised on October 30, 2008, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Limbaugh also knew that in 2001, then State Senator Barack Obama, who had sworn an oath to support the Constitution of both the United States and the State of Illinois, during an interview on Chicago Public Radio lamented, “The Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.”[16] Obama complained that the U.S. Supreme Court had not liberated state and federal governments from the constraints the Constitution had placed on them. What constraints? These would be the concepts of unalienable rights endowed by the Creator, the separation of powers, and the enumerated powers, all of which are foundational to our Constitution. Obama recognized that changing the Constitution would be necessary to bring about the “redistributive change” his progressive policies called for, to significantly reduce what he viewed as “economic inequality” by heavily taxing the wealthy and redistributing that wealth to people with lower incomes through expansive social welfare programs—the kind of action the Constitution forbids. The fundamental transformation Limbaugh feared materialized in eight years of President Obama’s experiment in executive overreach, erecting an administrative state and infringing on individual rights.[17]
17. Ilya Shapiro, “Top 10 Ways Obama Violated the Constitution During His Presidency,” The Federalist, (January 19, 2017).
The cultural destruction and damage to the Constitution and to citizens’ trust in their elected officials, which President Obama achieved in eight years, accelerated during Biden’s four years, capped off with their combined appointments of three activist Leftists to the Supreme Court.
May 7, 1837, Daniel Webster warned against such well-intentioned, unchecked executive power.
18. Daniel Webster, “Reception at New York,” in The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster, ed. Edwin P. Whipple (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1914), 430-31. This foreshadows C. S. Lewis’s famous statement: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own Conscience” (God in the Dock, [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002], 292).
It is hardly too strong to say, that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions, real or pretended. When bad intentions are boldly avowed, the people will promptly take care of themselves. . . . Human beings, we may be assured, will generally exercise power when they can get it; and they will exercise it most undoubtedly, in popular governments, under pretences of public safety or high public interest. It may be very possible that good intentions do really sometimes exist when constitutional restraints are disregarded. There are men, in all ages, who mean to exercise power usefully; but who mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters. They think there need be but little restraint upon themselves. Their notion of the public interest is apt to be quite closely connected with their own exercise of authority.[18]
It is shocking not only how ignorant of our nation’s founding documents some elected officials are, but much worse, how they fundamentally disagree with the founding principles rooted in Christianity! During a confirmation hearing in September 2025, Senator Tim Kaine, a former Democratic Party Vice-Presidential candidate (2016), pounced on the opening remarks by Riley Barnes, nominated for Assistant Secretary of State, in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.[19] Kaine said this to Barnes:
19. Riley Barnes is the son-in-law of Albert Mohler, President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, KY.
I was struck by your opening comments, and I asked to get a copy of them so I could read them and make sure I quoted them correctly. You state . . . “Our rights come from God, our Creator, not from our laws, not from our governments.” I find that very, very troubling. The notion that rights do not come from laws and do not come from the government, but come from the Creator, that is what the Iranian government believes. It is a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Shia law. . . . So, the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling. . . . [T]he notion that our rights do not come from our laws or our government should make people very, very nervous because people of any religious tradition, or none, are entitled to the equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment. It should not matter what their religious background is, what they think about God or the Creator, what their church affiliation is.[20]
20. Tim Kaine, Foreign Relations Committee, Nomination Hearing, Transcripts, (September 3, 2025).
It is staggering that a U.S. senator could utter these words of rebuke and not hear his juvenile error, which, fifty years ago, any child in the Minnesota public school I attended would have promptly recognized. Thankfully, Senator Ted Cruz pointed out the historic irony and tragedy that these comments by Virginia’s junior senator display profound unawareness of another, better Virginian. Cruz said:
perhaps the most prominent Virginian to ever serve, Thomas Jefferson . . . wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator,” not by government, not by the Democratic National Committee, but by God “with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I have to say, it is stunning to me that the principle that God has given us natural rights is now deemed by Democrats some radical and dangerous notion. Mr. Jefferson was right when he wrote those words. Government exists to protect those rights, but slavery was not OK when U.S. law allowed it. It was wrong then. It is wrong now. It is always wrong.[21]
21. Foreign Relations Committee, Nomination Hearing, Transcripts, (September 3, 2025).
Tragically, Senator Kaine does not grasp that if our rights derive “not from our laws, not from our government,” he unwittingly sides with the Iranian government, that “theocratic regime” rooted in the false, humanly contrived religion, Islam. Thus, he does not apprehend that, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers presuppose that “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” entitled the colonists to declare the causes that prompt them “to dissolve the political bonds” that held them under British rule. Likewise, Kaine does not understand that the Founding Fathers excluded laws and government originating in human whims as the source of individual rights by plainly stating that it is “self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” Senator Kaine has a vastly different understanding of God than that of the Founders. Consequently, he fails to recognize that only a government founded on belief in the unchanging laws of the Creator, who reveals himself in his creation and who alone endows all humans with individual rights, can assure equal protection under the law to all its citizens, their own “religious background” or “church affiliation” notwithstanding.
Conclusion
Trace the origins of these numerous threads:
- The Liberal church denominations that abandoned the true gospel for a social one.
- The immigration policies reshaped without regard to the civic assimilation earlier generations took for granted.
- The Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory dressed up as compassionate pedagogy.
- The capitulation of Christian college administrators who virtue-signaled how compassionate they were.
- Elected officials not only ignorant of America’s founding Christian presuppositions and principles but openly hostile to the Constitution’s restraints on government.
A single pattern appears. None of this was organic cultural drift. It was an intentional ideological replacement, pursued patiently over five decades through churches, schools, seminaries, courts, and the highest office in the land, precisely because the nation’s original, though tattered, unifying Christian-derived culture stood as an impediment to its objective.
A nation whose Constitution presupposes the Creator’s endowment of individual rights to a self-governing, morally and Christian-formed people cannot absorb the wholesale replacement of that formation without grievous consequences. The foundational culture rooted in Christian churches, which the Founders presupposed would restrain “Avarice, Ambition, Revenge, or Gallantry,” has been steadily eroded by policy-makers and the administrative state, as well as by the judicial activism chronicled here. All these are allied together with a common goal. They are the fruit of activists wittingly and ingenuous followers unwittingly implementing ideas a group of German Marxists conspired to topple the Christian culture of the West, especially America’s resilient culture.
Can America be redeemed? Yes, with God, all things are possible. And just as the nation’s founding was rooted deep in a culture emanating from Christianity’s culture-shaping message, so its redemption can never occur apart from a culture reshaped by the proclamation of the Christian gospel, wherein is God’s power. Will churches and their ministers of the gospel recover the nerve to name and condemn anti-Christian ideologies that conspire, corrode, corrupt, and contaminate individuals who constitute the culture and call the nation back to the gospel’s moral and religious foundation on which the U.S. Constitution rests?
