Rex Colubra is a Wisconsin diver who has developed a unique relationship with a wild, smallmouth bass he named Elvis. Colubra was exploring a lake in 2021 when “all these fish were coming up to me,” he explains. “I noticed one was sticking closer than the rest.” When he returned to the lake a few weeks later, he brought crawfish snacks for his new friend.

Since then, he has visited Elvis about a dozen times, documenting their reunions for his 174,000 TikTok followers. “He’s completely obsessed with me,” Colubra states. “He follows me around and just stares me in the eyes.” Skeptics might wonder how the diver knows Elvis from the other fish, but he says the fish has a “unique mouth disfigurement,” likely from a fishing hook.

Colubra refers to Elvis as “my underwater lover,” “aqua puppy,” and “buddy beneath the waves.” In a November 2022 Instagram post, he states, “My closest friend is a fish.”

Loneliness is as dangerous as cigarettes

New York Times columnist David French reports that between 1990 and 2021, the percentage of Americans reporting that they had no close friends quadrupled. Almost half of all Americans surveyed reported having three close friends or fewer.

The Wall Street Journal notes that 27 percent of respondents to a recent survey reported symptoms of an anxiety disorder, up from 8 percent in 2019. Half of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds report anxiety or depression symptoms.

What is the source of our discontent?

Our political divisiveness is one factor: 65 percent of us say we always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics. Rising crime and violence are another: Target has closed nine stores in four states because of rampant crime, for example. Financial fears are another contributor: the markets have been falling in September, as they often do; on this day in 2008, the Dow suffered the largest single-day drop to that point in its history.

As a reflection of culture, our music is getting sadder. Gen Z loneliness is so bad that some young adults are spending thousands of dollars trying to make friends through social clubs and gym memberships. Research shows that people who are socially disconnected have a 29 percent higher risk of heart disease, a 32 percent greater risk of stroke, and a 50 percent increased risk of dementia for older adults.

According to a recent advisory from the US Surgeon General’s office, loneliness can increase the risk of premature death as much as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

“When men choose not to believe in God”

Here’s what I think is going on: our secularized worldview is victimizing us.

Gerard Baker said it well in the Wall Street Journal this week: “Over the past thirty years, the values of Judeo-Christian belief that had inspired and sustained Western civilization and culture for centuries have been steadily replaced in a moral, cultural, and political revolution of the postmodern ascendancy. But the contradictions and implausibilities inherent in this successor creed have been increasingly exposed.”

He points to the rejection of national borders, a “quasi-biblical belief in climate catastrophism,” and a “wholesale cultural self-cancellation in which the virtues, values, and historic achievements of traditional civilization are rejected.” There’s more to his profound article than I have space to report, but I want to elaborate theologically on his third sociological factor.

We were made for relationship with God and each other. This is why St. Augustine’s famous prayer—“Our heart is restless until it rests in you”—strikes such an evocative chord in our souls. And it is why Satan does all he can to lead us into sin, knowing that it will drive us away from God (Genesis 3:8) and each other (v. 12).

Now that we are living in a culture that rejects the very notion of “sin,” our enemy must be very pleased. When there are no speed limits, lane markers, or guardrails, crashes are inevitable. The Belgian author and poet Émile Cammaerts was right: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. Then they become capable of believing in anything.”

“Consequences have compound interest”

Commenting on the prophetic warning, “They sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” (Hosea 8:7), Max Lucado writes: “Consequences have compound interest. You determine the quality of tomorrow by the seeds you sow today.”

No matter how far our secularized society drifts from God, it is still true that the gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16). It is the only power of God for salvation. It is the only spiritual chemotherapy for the spiritual malignancy that afflicts every human being.

Therefore, as spiritual oncologists, it would be malpractice for us to offer any other therapy but this. Our job is to show people they have cancer, point to the only therapy that can save them, and teach them how to receive and share it.

If you and I were medical oncologists, we would know that our work is urgent for saving lives. As spiritual oncologists, we can know that our work is even more urgent for saving eternal souls before they perish into eternal separation from God in hell.

To recast Robin Williams’ observation in biblical terms: The greatest gift is eternal life, and the greatest sin is to return it unopened.

With whom will you share it today?

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Last night, Janet and I watched the second Republican presidential debate. The seven participants took aim at each other, President Biden for his perceived failings, and former President Donald Trump for not attending. While our ministry does not endorse candidates, I will say how grateful I felt to live in a country where candidates must go through such a rigorous process to be elected. Across much of human history and in much of the world today, last night’s event would never have occurred.

In light of the value of our democracy, it is odd to me that so many people these days—men, especially—seem to be fascinated with the Roman Empire. Even when it was a republic, Rome was never anything like the democracy we embrace and appreciate. Colonial Americans went to war to remove themselves from the power of a despotic ruler whom many of Rome’s emperors would have recognized and celebrated.

However, a noted historian of the Empire explains that “ancient Rome is a kind of safe place for macho fantasies. It’s where men can pretend to be macho men.” Another historian adds that “the display of might—especially when backed up by color, clamor, and overpowering architecture—can be stirring, even thrilling.”

Cultural edifices aside, there is an even more urgent parallel between Rome and America, one to which Christians need to respond with passion today.

“The fall of an empire and the fate of America”

I have long been fascinated by the ancient Greco-Roman world. I’ve led more than forty study tours to various parts of the Roman Empire and did my doctorate in philosophy of religion with special emphasis on ancient philosophy.

I was especially interested some years ago in Cullen Murphy’s Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. Here are similarities he notes between their empire and our nation:

• Both built the most powerful military in their world, by far (America invests as much in military expenditures as the next ten nations combined).
• The Roman road system, stretching some fifty-three thousand miles, was about the length of the US interstate system.
• The Roman Empire and its Mediterranean Sea would fit neatly inside America’s lower forty-eight states.
• Both cherish a glorious past and embrace a Manifest Destiny. Rome claimed to be an imperium sine fine (empire without end), while America’s dollar bill proclaims us to be a novus ordo (new order).

Of course, dissimilarities are conspicuous as well:

• Rome never left the Iron Age; America has evolved from the agricultural to the industrial era to the Information Age.
• Slaves made up half of the Empire (some emperors owned twenty thousand or more), while America eventually rejected slavery.
• Rome had no middle class; the middle class is America’s core sociological fact.
• As noted earlier, Rome was never remotely as democratic as America.

“If it is female, cast it out”

Here’s the intersection that I believe especially deserves our notice and response: the parallel between abortion today and infanticide in ancient Rome.

Folk remedies and herbs such as silphium and pennyroyal were used as abortifacients in the ancient world. However, unwanted pregnancies were much more often resolved by abandoning the children after birth.

In a fascinating and troubling article on abortion and the “repaganizing” of our culture, Louise Perry quotes the anthropologist David F. Lancy, who describes the “far more common pattern”: “Among the ancient Greeks and Romans sickly, unattractive, or unwanted infants were ‘exposed’ or otherwise eliminated.” For example, we have a letter from a Roman soldier named Hilarion to his pregnant wife Alis in 1 BC: “Above all, if you bear a child and it is male, let it be; if it is female, cast it out” with the trash.

As I noted yesterday, infanticide is the logical extension of reasoning for abortion: no unwanted children should be born (or allowed to live), mothers should make birth (or parenting) decisions in light of their circumstances, and society has no right to tell mothers whether or not to choose abortion (or infanticide).

Perry cites Princeton University bioethicist Peter Singer as recognizing the logical parallels between the two: “Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time,” he explains. “So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.” In Perry’s view, the decline of Christian influence in our culture is escalating such a paganized rejection of the value of life.

“All this wealth has been laid waste”

Ancient Canaanites often worshiped their god Molech through child sacrifice. The Lord sternly prohibited such atrocities: “There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering” (Deuteronomy 18:10). When the Jewish people rejected his command and “slaughtered my children and delivered them up as an offering by fire,” God destroyed their nation in judgment (Ezekiel 16:21).

As we have seen, Rome likewise endorsed and practiced the wholesale killing of preborn and newborn children. Theirs was the most powerful and wealthy empire the world had ever seen (cf. Revelation 18:16), but when God’s judgment came, “in a single hour all this wealth has been laid waste” (v. 17). This text is in God’s word as a warning to all who would follow.

Are we listening?

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