Choosing faith over fad

OPINION:

“New” is the favorite word of the marketplace. “Old” has its place too: the dumpster.

Human nature, after all, is to make tomorrow an improvement over yesterday. Nowhere is “progress” — expressed in fads and trends — more fashionable than in America.

Accordingly, so-called “progressives” are today’s trend-seekers who scorn the nation’s supposed outmoded past and conspire to rip U.S. society off its Christian foundations. In doing so, they foolishly risk toppling the 250-year-old experiment and thwarting the advancement they covet.

Commonsense Americans should stand against the ideological forces of destruction and safeguard the Christian values upon which the nation’s historic preeminence has depended.

A catalog of recent anti-Christian offenses emanating from official Washington is now on display. The Trump administration’s Department of Justice has released a 565-page report titled “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias Within the Federal Government.”

The study reads, “The Biden Administration’s policies regularly clashed with a Christian worldview and burdened traditional religious practices. These conflicts frequently arose over abortion, gender ideology, and sexual orientation. Ultimately, the Biden Administration penalized Christians who lived in accordance with their beliefs.”

Among 14 key findings, the task force reports that the Biden Justice Department employed more aggressive prosecution against nonviolent pro-lifers who demonstrated at abortion clinics than against violent protesters who attacked pregnancy resource centers.

Additionally, the Biden FBI relied on a smear campaign launched by the far-left-aligned Southern Poverty Law Center as justification for tracking traditional Catholics. The Biden Internal Revenue Service investigated Christian pastors and organizations simply because they promoted biblical teachings.

Americans old enough to remember the depredations of the militantly atheistic Soviet Union perpetrated against people of faith — the shuttering of churches and arresting of priests — can recognize similarities in the accounts of religious persecution that President Biden presided over in the name of “justice.”

Among particularly egregious examples of Biden-era religious affronts, according to the report, was Mr. Biden’s proclamation on Good Friday 2024 of “Transgender Day of Visibility,” which was to be celebrated on Easter Sunday. Only the hopelessly naive would not grasp the affront to Christian gender norms.

Apparently, neither the president’s Catholic faith nor his constitutional duties prompted him to defend the First Amendment, which prohibits any law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

To be fair, hypocrisy is nondenominational. Moreover, many branches of the faith that revere the cross have been in decline among the American population for years. The Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Survey found that the share of U.S. adults identifying as Christian fell from 78% in 2007 to 61% in 2024.

Sadly, then, the Biden era’s harassment of Christian believers coincided with the gradual weakening of Christian values across the American cultural landscape. For years, Mr. Biden’s Democratic Party has been controlled by far-left “progressives” who fancy themselves historically anointed agents of change.

When, in 2008, Democratic icon Barack Obama proclaimed: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek,” he was simply articulating party orthodoxy.

Fortunately, not all Americans are ready to join the “Out with the old, in with the new” campaign — likely because they dread the social turmoil that invariably follows. “Progressivism” emerged from the same left wing of the political spectrum from which arose dialectic materialism.

That Marxist theory holds that matter comprises the totality of existence. Just as matter in motion is driven by a principle of internal contradiction, the same principle is mirrored in human development as an incessant battle between competing interests.

Accordingly, human conflict is viewed as the engine of human progress — or, in a manner of speaking, bad is good. It is no wonder, then, that far-left Democrats view social strife over race, gender and economic status as “progress.”

Absent the beclouded prism of Marxist ideology, though, rational thought recognizes that turmoil — manifested in politically charged anger and resentment so prevalent on the left — is the driver of social destruction.

By contrast, Christianity’s philosophical model affirms the existence of spirit and exalts the preeminence of spirit over matter. It contends that the seven virtues emanating from the divine Origin of spirit — prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, faith, hope and charity — are the true engines of human progress.

Happily, there are indications that “progressivism” is failing to snuff out the Christian paradigm of betterment. In the final months of its 2024 survey, the Pew Research Center uncovered a small but encouraging uptick in the proportion of U.S. adults identifying as Christians, rising from 61% to 62%.

Additionally, a survey released by the Barna Group in September 2025 finds that Generation Z and Millennial churchgoers — together comprising those born from 1981 to 2012 — lead all Americans in church attendance. They average 1.9 and 1.8 times a month, respectively, while all U.S. church-attending adults average 1.6 times a month.

Only time will tell whether these findings herald a lasting resurgence of the nation’s interest in its religious heritage, but a revival of enthusiasm for faith among young Christians is a hopeful sign.

Trend-seekers on the ideological left make the mistake of giving vent to angry emotions antithetical to the progress they crave. Commonsense Americans should instead choose faith over fad and safeguard the Christian roots responsible for their nation’s success.

• Frank Perley is a former senior editor and editorial writer for Opinion at The Washington Times.