Russia – in the form of the Soviet Union – used to be America’s greatest enemy. Ronald Reagan called it the “Evil Empire.” “One nation under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 in response to “godless Communism.” The United States was different, Americans were told. We believed in God. The Russians were officially atheistic.

How times have changed. The following is from “Who’s Godless Now? Russia Says It’s U.S.”

“At the height of the Cold War, it was common for American conservatives to label the officially atheist Soviet Union a ‘godless nation.’

“More than two decades on, history has come full circle, as the Kremlin and its allies in the Russian Orthodox Church hurl the same allegation at the West.

“‘Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved away from their roots, including Christian values,’ Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a recent keynote speech. ‘Policies are being pursued that place on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in God and a belief in Satan. This is the path to degradation.’

“In his state of the nation address in mid-December, Mr. Putin also portrayed Russia as a staunch defender of ‘traditional values’ against what he depicted as the morally bankrupt West. Social and religious conservatism, the former KGB officer insisted, is the only way to prevent the world from slipping into ‘chaotic darkness.’”

“As part of this defense of ‘Christian values,’ Russia has adopted a law banning ‘homosexual propaganda’ and another that makes it a criminal offense to ‘insult’ the religious sensibilities of believers.”

Russia still has its problems, but after 70 years of Communist rule, the execution of “some 200,000 clergy and believers from 1917 to 1937,” the destruction of thousands of churches, “and the churches that survived the purge had been “turned into warehouses, garages or museums of atheism,” the nation has a lot to fix.

There’s a good chance that if Congress doesn’t act, that churches in America could close or at least be dragged into court by refusing to acquiesce to the same-sex GayGB.

Time will tell if Russia can right itself after so many years of impoverishment, militarism, and a debased economic system.

“The separation of the secular and the religious is a fatal mistake by the West,” Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin said. “It is a monstrous phenomenon that has occurred only in Western civilization and will kill the West, both politically and morally.”

But what we do know, the bullet train of secularism and moral depravity will destroy this once great nation that was described by John Winthrop (1587/8-1649) and others as “a city on a hill.”

“We shall be as a city upon a hill,” Winthrop told the passengers of the Arbella who left England in 1630 to carve a new nation out of a wilderness. “The eyes of all people are upon us.”

The eyes of all the people are upon us to see how a once great nation has become a cesspool of decadence made legitimate by five puny gods that sit in judgment of the only God.

To many people, personal peace and affluence have become more important than the ideas and ideals that made the United States the envy of the world. As Cotton Mather (1663–1728) asserted, the Christian faith had brought the colonies prosperity, but “the daughter destroyed the mother — there is a danger, lest the enchantments of this world make them forget their errand into the wilderness: to build a city on a hill, an illumination for all the world.”

The light is growing dim.