Grace and Government Increase

I have noticed a disturbing trend in Western society in the last forty years.  Europe, once the hotbed of Christianity, has been thoroughly secularized with church attendance hovering around a whopping 8-9% in most places.  Although America has yet to reach these low numbers, the trend is definitely going that way.

Why should anyone other than a minister care about this?  Well, one thing that I have noticed is that with the decreasing influence of the church comes a decreasing emphasis on grace.  Grace is disappearing from our society as people turn their backs on faith and walk away from the church.  However, the problems still remain.  People are still concerned about divorce, violence, crime, homelessness, etc.  There still exists a desire for some kind of morality- people still hate being lied to, cheated on, cut off in traffic, treated unfairly, etc.  So what is the answer?

When grace leaves a society, the only thing left is legislation.  If people cannot deal with evil by grace, they have to deal with it by making more and more rules to govern an increasingly corrupt and rebellious society.  As Christianity has left the continent of Europe, government there has grown by leaps and bounds.  We see socialist states in the western part, and for a good part of the last century, communist states in the eastern part.  Government has grown and taken over more and more of life as the power of the Christian faith, and the power of grace, has subsided.

The same is true in America.  If American society does not embrace the grace found in the Gospel of Jesus, we too will see an increasingly alarming turn towards more and more legislation, as the world tries to deal with the problem of morality and evil in the only way it knows how to handle it.  More rules.  More guidelines.  More laws.  More government programs to create a fair society- one that can only be created through God's kingdom.  America needs to wake up and see that as grace disappears from society, rules and regulations increase.  As faith in Christ disappears, and the love and morality that goes with it disappears, we will see more and more governmental regulation and oversight. 

The answer isn't smaller government.  The answer is grace.  That's what this world needs.  But if the United States doesn't wake up and realize its need for grace, it will find itself under increasing government control.  I prefer grace.