Explore how belief in God anchors truth and moral order in society, crucial for civilization’s survival.

Next Thursday evening, Jews will celebrate the holiday of Shavuot. This holiday, which occurs seven weeks and one day after Passover (hence the name Shavuot, which literally means “weeks”), commemorates perhaps the most transformative event in all of human history: the revelation of the Word of God to the ancient Israelite nation. It was at Mount Sinai, congregated at the base of the smoking and trembling mountain, that God promised the Israelites they would be a “kingdom of princes and a holy nation” if they accepted and maintained fidelity to His covenant. In unison, before they had even received the Ten Commandments, the Israelites responded, “All that the Lord has spoken we shall do!”

Because of the breadth and depth of its impact and lasting influence, the Divine Revelation at Sinai was the logical starting point for what we now call Western civilization. Writing thousands of years later at another inflection point in human history, Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist No. 31: “In disquisitions of every kind, there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend.” In the United States specifically, and in Western civilization more generally, it was long obvious what those “primary truths” and “first principles” actually meant: the Word of God Himself. Such a properly anchored and oriented society is uniquely suited to improve mankind’s lot and advance human flourishing.

In a Washington Post op-ed earlier this month, Gregory Conti, a politics professor at perennially top-ranked Princeton University, lamented: “Several years ago, one of my colleagues at Princeton University hosted a lecture on religion and free speech. The talk didn’t seem to be landing with the students. Finally, he realized why: The speaker had made repeated reference to the Ten Commandments, and several students didn’t know what they were.” Conti noted that Princeton students are often smart and driven, but they lack basic religious literacy — even the difference between the Old and New Testaments. In short, many of America’s future leaders do not even recognize the “primary truths” and “first principles” upon which our civilization rests.

There is a clear casualty of this ignorance: our ability to accept reality and the truth. Consider, for example, the shocking inability to do precisely that among far too many members of America’s more avowedly secularist political party, the Democrats. A whopping 42% of Democrats believe the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania in July 2024 was staged. A similarly galling 34% of Democrats believe the same about the recent attempted assassination of Trump and his Cabinet members at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C. There is, of course, zero evidence to support either belief. One might as well believe in Bigfoot, or that Neil Armstrong’s moon landing was fake.

There can be nothing good down this road. Only a society that is rooted in, and oriented toward, the eternal and the transcendental can ever hope to cultivate decent, truth-seeking citizens. When a free people loses the ability to discern between truth and fiction, rightness and wrongness, justice and injustice, there can only be only misery, despair and destruction. We’re losing that because, for far too long, we’ve been missing God. There is no better time than the run-up to America’s semiquincentennial — when we will celebrate the assertion of the self-evident truths that birthed the nation — to find Him once again. Frankly, America’s survival for another 250 years depends on it.

        To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at http://www.creators.com.

Josh Hammer  5:00 PM | May 17, 2026

Source: A Society Without God Is a Society Without Truth – HotAir