Without Firing a Shot

 

It has long been said that Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev once warned the West, in effect, "We'll take you without firing a shot." I was a boy when that line was circulating, but I still remember the grown-ups around me reacting to it — not with fear exactly, but with a kind of indignant disbelief. The notion that anyone could take America without an army, without a bomb, without so much as a bullet, struck them as absurd. We were the strongest nation on earth. We had just come through a world war. We were not going to allow such a thing to happen.

I have thought about that line many times since. Not because I believe Khrushchev was a prophet in any biblical sense, but because the question he raised — can a great nation be undone from the inside? — turns out to be one of the most important questions any people can ask of itself.

How We Got Strong

For most of my life, the United States led the world on nearly every front, and I don't think that was an accident. One of the monumental reasons we were able to lead is that we tended to look for people in whom creativity was married to a love for the nation, and we did our best to empower them. We let them research. We let them discover. We let them start businesses, take risks, and contribute — to the economy, yes, but also to the social and even moral culture of the country.

We had watched other nations try socialism, try communism, try a thoroughgoing secularism that pushed God out of public life. We had watched many of those experiments rise and then fall. And having watched, we stood firm. We loved our country. We held to our democratic instincts. We believed that ordered liberty — freedom inside a framework of shared moral conviction — was the soil in which human flourishing actually grows.

That last part matters. Freedom by itself is not a foundation. Freedom is a gift that has to rest on something. When it rests on virtue, on conviction, on a people who govern themselves from the inside, it produces a nation worth admiring. When it rests on nothing, it becomes something else entirely.

The Turn

About ten years after Khrushchev made his remark, things began to change in America, and they changed markedly. I say this not as an outside observer but as someone who was part of it. I was there. My generation began to tear down traditions — and I'll be honest, some of those traditions deserved to come down. But here is the trouble: we tore them down and put nothing in their place. We didn't replace a flawed tradition with a better one. We replaced it with a vacuum, because what we wanted, what we demanded, was to be "free spirits."

We mistook the absence of restraint for the presence of freedom. They are not the same thing. A river without banks is not a freer river; it is a swamp.

Here is something I have come to believe, and I'll state it plainly: a country, a culture, a community, a church — any belief system at all — will never drift on its own toward the conservative vision. The drift is always leftward, always toward what loosens and compromises the convictions that once held the thing firm. This is not a partisan observation so much as an observation about human nature. Left to itself, water runs downhill. Left to itself, a garden runs to weeds. Left to itself, a people will tend to trade hard-won conviction for easy comfort. Holding a culture firm requires constant, deliberate, uphill effort. Letting it slide requires nothing at all but neglect.

That is why every generation has to win the argument again, and candidly, it would seem that we lost the argument. Nothing good is ever inherited automatically. It is either tended or it is lost.

A Reality My Parents Wouldn't Recognize

My parents — just one or two generations back — would scarcely recognize the country we live in now. They would be appalled that New York City elected a man who professed himself a Socialist; I heard him profess it. That simply would not have happened in the America of their lifetime. And it is no longer an isolated thing — others who hold the same convictions are now being seated in our houses of government. I think too of the cultural confusion that has grown so deep that we now struggle, in our highest institutions, to agree on definitions that every previous generation took as obvious. When a court can seat a justice on SCOTUS who will not say plainly what a woman is, a society has lost more than a debate. It has lost a shared grip on reality itself — and for me that raises hard questions about what such a person has already decided before a single case is ever argued.

I don't say these things to score points against anyone. I say them because they are evidence of drift — the slow, quiet, downhill drift I described — and because drift, unlike invasion, doesn't announce itself. No shot is fired. There is no smoke, no siege, no border crossed. There is only the steady erosion of conviction, one compromise at a time, until one morning a people wakes up in a country their grandparents would not recognize and cannot quite explain how they got there.

Seen that way, the old Secretary's remark starts to feel less like Cold War bluster and more like an uncomfortable description of how nations actually fall.

What Was Actually Said

I should be fair to history here, because honesty is part of conviction too. There is real conjecture about what Khrushchev actually said. The interpreters in the room have suggested other renderings of his words: "We will bury you," or "We will outlast you," or even "We will be there at your burial." The famous "without firing a shot" version is most likely a later elaboration, an American paraphrase that grew in the retelling.

But notice something. Even the verified version carries the same chill. We will outlast you. Not defeat you in battle — outlast you. Wait you out. Let you exhaust yourselves, divide yourselves, forget yourselves, until there is nothing left to conquer. Whether or not Khrushchev ever said the famous line, the idea behind it describes our present moment with painful accuracy.

Look at the temper of our times: the hostility between neighbors, the polarization of our politics, the open desire among many to drag the whole enterprise toward an extreme it has never known. You don't need a Soviet premier to take a nation like that. A nation like that is already doing the work itself.

If My People

I pray we are not as far gone as the trend lines suggest. And I want to be clear about where I believe the answer is found, because it is not finally in an election, a policy, or a political movement, as much as those things matter.

For me, the answer is found in the Word of God and God’s only Son – Jesus. As a point of fact, it begins with three words: "If My people."

"If My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land." (2 Chronicles 7:14)

Read that promise carefully and you'll notice God did not lay the burden of national recovery on the politicians, the pundits, or the cultural elite. He laid it on His people. The healing of a land begins not in the capitol but in the sanctuary, not in a campaign but in a heart that humbles itself. The conditions are four — humble, pray, seek, turn — and every one of them is something a believer can begin doing today, before breakfast, without anyone's permission.

To make this more personal, I point to the last promise in that verse which says, “Heal their land.” This seems to be the culmination of God’s words to Solomon, but it has a deeper and more expansive means. Start at the end of the verse and work backward.

If I want this land healed, sin must be forgiveness. For sin to be forgiven, we must hear from heaven. Here is the tricky or difficult part. To be heard in heaven requires “REPENTANCE” which is outlines in the first part of the verse and give four specific actions: humble yourself, pray, seek MY face, and turn from your wicked ways. Remember, these are God’s words, not mine but they are a roadmap to the healing of our land.

How stark a reality we face. And yet how hopeful, because the remedy is placed within reach. Burying our heads in the sand will not save us. Wringing our hands will not recover us. Despair is just another form of surrender — taking us, you might say, without firing a shot.

The drift is real, and it is always downhill. But the people of God are not called to drift. We are called to climb — to humble ourselves, to pray, to seek His face, and to turn. That is not a retreat from the culture. It is the one offensive that has ever actually healed a land.

I pray we take it up while there is still daylight.