A Grandma Calls America Back to God
“When people cease believing in God, it’s not that they start to believe in nothing,” the paraphrase of G.K. Chesterton goes. “It’s that they’ll believe in anything.”
Does this describe America today?
MaryAnn Diorio certainly appears to think so. An 80-year-old grandmother, author, and retired college professor, Diorio has diagnosed the cause of the United States’ woes.
“America is in decline because America has rejected God,” she wrote this past Sunday. “Plain and simple. Those who want to see will see. Those who do not want to see will not.”
There are good philosophical reasons to believe Diorio’s diagnosis, too. More on that later.
Diorio mentions that she’s the daughter and granddaughter of Italian immigrants, people drawn to America by freedom and opportunity. Her paternal grandmother was illiterate, but wise. And over the decades, they’d transition from illiteracy to being degreed. Diorio’s father was the first in his lineage to graduate college; she was the first doctorate holder. That’s a real sea change. While it occurred, however, Diorio witnessed another sea change — in our culture.
“Belief in God used to be the consensus in America, but it no longer is,” the author states. “And that is the crux of the issue: America has turned away from God and His Word.”
To be precise, most Americans still believe in “god” — just not in God. That is, Gallup found in 2022 that 81 percent (a new low) of Americans said they believed in God. This figure was 98 percent in the 1950s.
But there’s a qualitative difference, too. These Americans actually “say they believe that God or a universal spirit exists” (emphasis added), reported Pew last year. If “universal spirit” sounds New Age-ish and vague, that’s because it is. It’s also vague in something else: its moral prescriptions.
The Devil is in the (Lack of) Details
This, of course, isn’t quite what Diorio is talking about. She unabashedly proclaims that she believes “in God, and in Jesus Christ” — a specificity integral to her prescription. And even the non-religious may grasp the point, such as an atheist I encountered years ago online. He said that although he didn’t believe in God, he feared America’s de-Christianization. Why?
He understood that it would correlate with a moral unraveling.
So, though an atheist, he would’ve heeded George Washington’s warning in his Farewell Address (1796):
[R]eason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
(Note: “Religious principle” was essentially synonymous with “Christian principle” in Colonial America. The Founders weren’t thinking of a “Whatever works for you” “universal spirit.”)
This isn’t really hard to grasp, and we can start like this. Cultural anthropologists and others will lament it when an “indigenous” people has been Westernized and “denied” its native beliefs. “They’ve been separated from who they are,” we may hear. But if such a phenomenon matters, what about when Western peoples are separated from their traditional beliefs? Logic dictates that this will have some effect. What might it be?
Before getting to that, let’s review the cultural/religious sea change.
Seven Decades and a Thousand Years Ago
Relating experiences from her elementary-school days, Diorio writes:
In the 1950s, my first-grade public school teacher kept a Bible on her desk. Every morning, the class stood respectfully as she read from the Bible. Then we prayed. Afterward, we pledged allegiance to the American flag. This was the way American schoolchildren had been trained ever since our country’s founding.
Most Americans today, however, can’t even imagine such norms. It’s like when they hear (if they ever do) that boys would sometimes carry firearms openly on the NYC subways in the 1940s and ’50s because they had riflery clubs at school. Did such an America ever exist?
Was this an alternate universe — or maybe a movie?
But it didn’t last. Government-school-sponsored prayer and Bible readings were “found unconstitutional” in, respectively, 1962 and ’63 — and Hell followed soon after.
For example, Diorio mentions the 1960s “free sex” movement and abortion’s legalization in ’73. She laments academia’s full embrace of dark secular isms, Marxism, socialism, and feminism being examples. (We could also mention the degradation of media and, most significantly, entertainment, as it’s heavily imbibed by children.)
Really, though, this cultural degradation began well before the ’60s. Diorio briefly but sagely notes this, implicating the “Enlightenment” (1685-1815) in the decline’s initiation. And there is a reason theologian Tracey Rowland said that European Christian culture “reached its zenith in the thirteenth century.” It was an age in which people really believed.
Example: Medieval knights’ sins could be so egregious that they’d be told to walk to Jerusalem barefoot as a penance. They would do it, too.
In other words, the anti-Christian Supreme Court rulings were symptoms of declining faith at least as much as causes of it. This said, Diorio still makes a good point. To wit:
So what actually happened when God was removed from our schools and universities? In the Bible, Jesus said this: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Jesus calls Himself truth. When we removed Jesus from our schools, we effectively removed truth. When we removed truth, we invited the lie. And with the lie always come deception, division, and death.
For sure — the greatest lie of all is that there is no Truth.
Welcome to Third Millennium America
The United States has, too, become a land that doesn’t believe in Truth. Harking back to the separation from our foundational beliefs, consider what had long been the Western understanding:
- God exists.
- He has a will for us.
- This will is discernible via revelation and reason.
- This will includes moral constraints relating to human action.
Most Americans no longer believe in all four propositions, and that’s not opinion — it’s fact. As 2025 Arizona Christian University (ACU) research found, most U.S. adults
do not believe that there are any moral absolutes, and they live accordingly.… An earlier report from that survey noted that two out of three American adults currently reject or doubt the existence of absolute moral truth.
(Note: “Absolute moral truth” is a redundancy; Truth, properly understood, is absolute by definition.)
ACU found that this is even true of “Christians”: Most do not believe in Truth.
How bad is it? Barna Group research in 2002 found that only nine percent of “born-again” teens accepted Truth’s existence. (Ergo, they’d completely missed the point of the faith.)
This has consequences, too. Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “Without God … all things are permitted,” and we’ve seen this play out. Just consider serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s darkness-enabling attitude. “If it [life] all happens naturalistically,” he once told his father, “what’s the need for a God? Can’t I set my own rules?” And he sure did.
Beliefs Have Consequences
Of course, most Americans have no serial-killer-related urges (thankfully). Yet our now-dominant moral relativism/nihilism affects all embracing it. Coming to mind here, for example, is a kind-hearted (he really was) young man with whom I once worked. After I mentioned that an action he was contemplating would be wrong, he replied, “Yes — but not for me.”
And that’s what we’ve come to. Barna also found in 2002 that the most common way Americans make “moral” decisions is based on “whatever feels right or comfortable in a situation.” Is this surprising? Without Truth as your moral yardstick, that oh-so-seductive siren of emotion is the most compelling guide remaining.
And given this, is it surprising that feelings-based agendas now hold sway? An example is the “transgender” movement. It states that the objective, your sex, should be subordinated to the subjective: “feelings of ‘cross-gender’ identification.”
Apropos of this, Chesterton once wrote that without Christian authority, people will make the same old mistakes “over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves.” Post-Christian America is now repeating the old mistakes (e.g., socialism, libertinism) — with perhaps one or two new ones sprinkled in.
This is why Diorio concludes her appeal with:
Like an old grandmother to her grandchildren, I urge you, dear ones, always to remember that the lie will enslave you, but the truth will set you free.
The message is simple: We’ll never, ever MAGA unless we MACA: Make America Christian again.
