Take a few steps back. Look at how our political, social, and even family conversations – if they happen at all – would look to our  Founders, grandparents, or parents. Something is seriously wrong. Most of us know it, even if we hesitate to admit it. Nuttiness is replacing reason. Why?

Modern society appears to be afflicted – more every year – by a slide toward fantasy, not accepting reality, a kind of collective dysphoria, discomfort with reality, anxiety over long-established science, history, logic, experience, law, and faith – rising to rejection, replacement with alternate realities.

When big events occur in our lives, especially at a fast pace, involving trauma, major adjustments, constant change, we become uncertain, ill at ease, so we hesitate. As individuals – and we all know this – we can feel vulnerable, long for certainty. That used to mean going to bedrock, belief, faith.

Historically, Americans – and billions globally – found in Christianity (others in Judaism) undeniable truths, clarity, firmament, and strength. Forgiveness and mercy “all the days of our lives,” the Bible’s eternal promise, was understood to be real, an undying chance to get it right, and foundational.

This understanding – that a loving God has our backs if we ask – was ever present, a well of strength, humility, purpose and service. It centered us, reinforced us, gave us the path to light from darkness. George Washington, Lincoln, TR, Carter, Reagan, Trump and others have understood.

We used to understand, almost all of us. Those with a strong faith know. They know the role faith plays in good yet struggling lives, in our flawed, stumbling, hopeful but imperfect lives. They know.

Here is the rub. Americans – in overwhelming numbers – used to know, so many and to such a depth of understanding, with simplicity, consistency, resolve, and fidelity, that America became America, a “shining city on a hill,” beacon to whom the world looked for hope and freedom.

I say “whom” because it was not the vast land, but the people – We the People – to whom the world looked. Our faith lit candles in more nations and hearts than stars in the night sky. Since our rugged, impassioned but carefully well-reasoned birth, we have been blessed – and known it. Until now.

Today, in science – in a country with more than 420 Nobel Prizes, dozens in genetics – we have a clutch of people who deny that genetics are real, that boys and girls are unchangeable genetically from conception, never mind that God played a role in that miraculous event – formation of a new life.

Today, in history, we have a level of ignorance that revises the reality, idealism, and sacrifice that attended the creation of our nation, and the defense of enshrined freedoms in wars that have taken millions of lives.

Today, in logic, we have people who put no stock in what the Ancient Greeks, Aristotle, the Stoics, and all the great problem-solvers of human history have depended on for everything from war fighting to mathematical understanding, who deny math the way flat earthers denied the orb’s arc.

Today, in the realm of empirical experience – the heart of measuring and assessing behavior, economics, or ergonomics, we have a gathering mob who deny reality for their own fetish science, pet imaginings.

Today, in hard constitutional and statutory law – a brand of brazen, lazy brains and lazy governors, fake lawyers and creative pushers of destructive fiction compete with Supreme Court rulings, undermining long-understood meanings in our Constitution. They claim the rule of law, while they kill it.

And today, on faith, ignorance passes for scholarship, materialistic deniers and atheistic critics misinform, sue the faithful, and displace the Bible in the name of power. People in authority abuse power, push fake definitions, hate and mock the faithful and worship – if truth be told – themselves.

So, what is this? Is it anti-scientific, anti-historical, anti-logical, anti-empirical, anti-constitutional, anti-Christian, anti-faith? Yes, looks that way. We have some lost, lazy leaders – including in Maine. In the end, they pretend to be everything. Worse, they pretend to be God. Reality check: They are not.

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC. Robert Charles has also just released an uplifting new book, “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024).