“You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.” — Matthew 5:14

In December 2003, Judge Robert H. Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Liberalism & American Decline warned that America was headed for cultural demise. Has the United States become a modern Gomorrah? Most Christians and Jews once knew the origin of Sodom’s repute, and it was not “hospitality” as the Protestant religious left maintains. While Gomorrah suffered the same Biblical fate as its sibling city, the account in Genesis does not specify why.

That being the case, it is open to speculation and to questioning whether or not Gomorrahdomy is currently extant and as acceptable today as it was to ancient Sodomites three millennia ago.

Politically, a modern Gomorrah, as suggested by Judge Bork, could be a place wallowing in chaos where wisdom comes not from history and traditional Biblical values but from talk show hosts, media and entertainment personalities, and Internet blogs. Could the leading candidates for its highest public office include a woman under criminal investigation by the FBI, a self-proclaimed socialist, and a billionaire reality show host?

Twenty trillion dollars of national debt might burden a modern Gomorrah’s economy, even though it possesses enormous natural resources and once led the world in heavy industrial production. One of the principles of Gomorrahism is that corporate and individual wealth are bad, and the impoverished have less because people who work hard to earn a good living must have prospered at the poor’s expense. The wealthy are exploiters of opportunity who emerged to stand tall in the culture, and standing tall is an affront to anyone inured to slouching. A major tenet of Gomorrahism is that just showing up in life is sufficient and also deserving of reward.

Religion, like truth, is malleable in Gomorrah. Gomarrahites are free to worship whichever gods they wish, or no god at all except for those fools who believe in a Sovereign God of Definitive Truth. God or gods of one’s own choosing can be anything other than a supreme being who demands humility, repentance, obedience, and righteousness.

Education in Gomorrah is as malleable as morality. Diversity lies at its heart. Learning is a matter of self-discovery, and the past, recorded as it was by elitist white males, must be corrected lest it offend a host of multi-cultural sensitivities. If everyone is a victim, then there are no victimizers. Furthermore, in Gomorrah everyone can be a bystander. Slouching around life’s periphery is easy and inoffensive. Since understanding is, like truth, a matter of personal subjectivity, to pursue academic excellence is to oppose the leveled intellectual landscape derived from multi-culturalism and diversity. Modern Gomorrah is an idiocracy.

Gomorrah need not worry about defending itself. After Gomorrahizing itself politically, economically, religiously, and intellectually, Gomorrah largely withdrew from the world stage. It apologized for having ever aspired to being “a light for all personkind” and left its allies bewildered by a foreign policy firmly rooted in Gomorrahdic slush. Since Gomorrah’s defining foreign policy paradigm is rooted in the ethos of “Why can’t we all just get along,” the world’s bullies and barbarians are free to run amuck. Accordingly, modern Gomorrah abandoned Israel, the only democracy in a Middle East beset by Islamist religious fanaticism. It is a tenant of modern Gomorrahanic foreign policy not to verbalize—much less recognize—Islamist fundamentalism, lest doing so offended one of the world’s “great religions.” Forget that Islam abhors feminism, religious freedom, and homosexuality.

Russia filled the leadership vacuum by moving military forces into Syria and enabling Iran, a country that dubbed today’s Gomorrah as the ”Great Satan,” to funnel weapons to Hezbollah along with Republican Guard fighters. This may ignite the apocalypse, potentially obliterating Israel and portending the downfall of modern Gomorrah.

Finally, Gomorrah’s inept political leaders degraded its military, one that quickly liberated Kuwait in 1991, inspired emulation among the world’s armed forces, and was respected if also feared. By cutting budgets and imposing an adulterated value system on its armed forces, it traded the primary mission of fighting and winning the nation’s war for a focus on promoting gender equality, social justice, and social engineering. This resulted in a hollowed-out and demoralized force. Gomorrahism cannot understand that only the weak appreciate weakness while aggressors sensing weakness usually attack. Gomorrah’s reigning academic cadre, having long ago abandoned military history for the study of victims whether by class, gender, race, or ethnicity, is unprepared for the reality that aggressors always show up.

Indeed, we are a nation slouched in Gomorrah and facing an election worthy of a political Gong Show. The sick and sad events in Orlando, on many levels, reveal that our nation is operating with a badly skewed moral compass. Unable to distinguish between good and evil, we glorify the perverse while refusing to recognize the ideological evil of Islamist fundamentalism. And we, as a nation, dare not look on self-righteously because we have lost our bearings and are floating, rudderless, on a sea of political and ideological nonsense with a national election offering a choice between the ridiculous and the unfathomable, a choice that comes down to “the least reprehensible.”

Alexander the Great supposedly said, “I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep. I fear an army of sheep led by a lion.” For eight years the United States has wandered in an inoffensive, politically-correct strategic wilderness led by a president who cannot distinguish the tactical from the strategic levels of warfare, much less envision a strategic end state that promotes peace and secures our country and allies.

America needs a president with strategic vision grounded in a grasp of history as it happened, not as he or she wished it had happened. We need a president stoked with faith in the Lord God Almighty who blessed America with both resources and citizens who, throughout its history, have built the nation through struggle and were willing to die to preserve and extend to others the precious but often blood-bought blessings of liberty and freedom. This president would not mistake bombast for moral and spiritual courage. This must be someone who can think strategically and then conceive of a strategic bridge that brings resources, people, and ideas together to get the United States from where it is now to where it must be if we are to ensure for our posterity the freedoms we used to know but have somehow neglected and are about to lose. With God’s help, we again can be exceptional.

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Earl Tilford is a military historian and fellow for the Middle East & Terrorism with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. A retired Air Force intelligence officer, he earned his PhD in American and European military history at George Washington University. From 1993 to 2001, he served as Director of Research at the U.S. Army’s Strategic Studies Institute. In 2001, he left Government service for a professorship at Grove City College, where he taught courses in military history, national security, international and domestic terrorism, and counter-terrorism.

Image Credit: Lot and his family flee Sodom as it burns, by John Martin via Wikimedia Commons.