Awaiting a Savior

Christians next week recall the birth of Jesus, the long-awaited savior who comes to set his people free.

Jews continue to await the one who will fulfill God’s promise to Abraham and deliver Israel from the hands of its enemies.

Ancient Greek literature employed the device of deus ex machina to resolve the seemingly hopeless challenges embedded in its dramas. The epic Greek poem, “The Odyssey,” composed around the time of Isaiah’s prophecy, tells the story of Ithaca’s longing for the return of Odysseus and the removal of its tormentors.

Yes, the world has always pined for a savior.

This cycle of captivity-emancipation-captivity is as old as time. The primordial conflict between good and evil, seen when countries are at war, and experienced on the battlefield of every human heart, lumbers along, irrespective of creeds and cultures.

It perdures because we humans are wired for freedom. It comes with our God-given dignity. When our freedom of association, speech, and religious belief is attacked, when we are told by government what to think, believe, say and do, we naturally rebel. And when we abuse our freedoms and choose evil instead of good, or succumb to the coercion of addictive influences, then a type of enslavement ensues.

A new year is about to dawn.  So, what oppresses Americans these days? Sadly, there’s a long list of slave masters beyond Pharoah and his imitators in government.

Modern slaves, modern slave masters

You may roll your eyes over the first I will cite, but it is deadly and serious: Pornography. More people visit porn sites each month than TikTok, Amazon, or Netflix, by hundreds of millions. These views have consequences. Porn has assaulted male-female relationships and demeaned human sexuality, creating a society of voyeurs and sex addicts. Porn is ubiquitous. As an industry, it makes $13 billion a year, chewing up and spitting out the lives of so many people, ruining marriages or discouraging them, driving down birth rates, and worst of all, using children to entice their predators. So many adolescents are lured into the secretive world of porn addiction. Who will protect them?  Not Congress, that’s for sure.

And what about gambling addiction? Gambling is now advertised as a good, with celebrity endorsements and such. Gambling is ruinous. An estimated 2.5 million Americans have a severe gambling problem, and their families, too, pay a price. But who cares about the losers when over $65 billion in bets were waged last year?  Gamblers are at the mercy of gambling.

Drug and alcohol addiction also attack human agency and dignity. Nearly 30 million Americans have a severe drinking problem. You’d think because the media no longer talks about the opioid crisis, that it peaked at 84,181 deaths in 2022 and has gone away. It hasn’t. In 2023, there were 81,083 deaths. One in five Americans is a pot smoker. We are just beginning to see the social and psychological pathologies associated with the legalization of this drug.

What about the enslavement of technology? Who will save young people, particularly girls, from Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and the other profit-seeking wolves who feed screen addiction? Artificial intelligence, AI, diminishes humanity, eliminates jobs, and most of all, attacks truth itself. Who will liberate us from the tyranny of greedy Big Tech? Not the government.

Addiction isn’t the only thing holding Americans hostage.  We need protection from those who want to pervert medicine. Take the assisted-suicide movement that wants to turn doctors into killers. Proponents are trying to destigmatize this new, “do harm” ethic by calling it “medical aid in dying.”

This same language engineering was employed by some in the medical community when they began torturing young people experiencing gender dysphoria, calling it “gender affirming care.” England has seen the light and banned this barbaric practice. From 2019-2023, over 13,000 minors received sex-reassignment treatment. Their cries to be saved from themselves and adult medicine went ignored. Our government either enabled this harm or did nothing to stop it.

The elderly also are oppressed by scammers who trick them into turning over their life savings. Who will protect these vulnerable Americans from the thieves who steal over $3 billion from them each year? The FBI reports the data but fails to punish the scammers.

Who will save us?

Cries for deliverance arise elsewhere, from the victims of crime, racism, terrorism and antisemitism, to the unborn who aren’t permitted to live and the disabled who are urged to die, to the poor who are increasingly invisible to us, to nature itself, wherever the environment is desecrated.

Who can save us? Not politicians. Donald Trump is not our savior. If we want to liberate those in chains and hear the cry of the oppressed, then we must ask God to direct our actions and save us from ourselves. As the beautiful 15^th century hymn goes, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel.”

Salvation comes from God, not man. I am more hopeful than ever.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

Jim Towey’s blog will return January 9, 2025

(The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Aging with Dignity and/or its Board of Directors.)