“Men have forgotten God.”
That is the reason given by author and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, after 50 years of studying and writing about the history of the Russian Revolution that led to the death of over 60 million people.
In fact, he continued: “What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire 20th century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.”
If that analysis were extended to today, to include the cultural chaos that emerged in the years after the Cold War into the first decades of the 21st century, it would be, “And, forgetting God, they abandoned truth.”
The abandonment of truth took the form of increasingly bizarre demands, especially within academia, government and media, to accommodate what were obvious lies, myths and falsehoods. According to Romans 1, the primary consequence of rejecting the Creator is to believe lies about reality, morality and the human person. In our day, these lies are often sold with demands of “inclusion and equity” and with the promise of being free from traditional moral constraints and even the restrictions imposed by reality itself. These promises were as false as the lies. Instead of freedom, we’ve built a world with epidemic levels of unhappiness and isolation, not to mention the increased use of power and manipulation to enforce ideas that are obviously not true.
Men have forgotten God and thus abandoned the notion of truth. This is the basic description of what Os Guinness has called “our civilizational moment,” a pivotal time in the history of the West. A fascinating development in recent years has been watching as former skeptics of truth and God rethink the significance of both. Some who, just decades ago, proclaimed God a delusion and religion a poison talk about what we’ve lost in abandoning each. Of course, there are others who have doubled down on deception.
However, how God calls his people to engage this moment is no different than how he has called Christians at every other moment. We are called to bow our hearts and our knee to Jesus Christ, the source of all truth and the embodiment of God’s love for the world. Christians are to be truth tellers, and to tell the truth in the way God has told us.
At the very least, we must not only know what is true, we must have confidence in what is true. Otherwise, we will respond to the deceptions and the deceivers of our time and place with either silence or anger. Silence is never appropriate. Anger is occasionally called for, but never in place of loving those who are the victims of lies. Love should never be confused with niceness. It is never loving to be co-opted into lies.
The promises of freedom by abandoning truth have failed us. Jesus’ promise of freedom is sure and certain, and it comes through knowing the truth. In other words, by calling people to the truth, Christians offer freedom. This is our calling, especially in this civilizational moment.
— John Stonestreet
From Breakpoint, July 14, 2025; reprinted by permission of the Colson Center, breakpoint.org.