It's always a bit of a risk, and can be borderline off-putting, to intertwine prayer and politics in an overt way, or even to seem to do so. Readers or listeners rightly recoil when somebody suggests that God takes sides in politics, or that his (the person's) own politics are more godly than that of his opponents, or (worse) that he undertook his own candidacy or cause because God "told" him to do so. That's not what this is about. This also isn't one of those "the-sky-is-falling" sorts of rants in which the point is that the nation is somehow on the verge of utter disaster and can be saved only by openly miraculous, divine intervention. Things aren't great in the good'ol USA right now, but we're not (quite) at that extremity yet.

Instead, at issue here is something more subtle. At issue is a country that has lost its way, in part because far too many millions of its individual citizens have lost their own way in their daily lives. The full litany of ills is so familiar that anything more than a sample list of them would be boring: out-of-wedlock pregnancies, abortions, hideously trashy prime-time TV shows, raunchy music, attire in public that isn't just slovenly but scandalous, casual acceptance of financial cheating… and more, ad infinitum. Another, less-recognized sin is that of a certain form of sloth, which shows itself in declining standards across the board -- as evidenced, for just one example, in this week's story (similar to dozens of other stories on such subjects in the past two decades) about just how pathetically American children do on tests of the most basic historical (or civic-related) information. (What gets lost in this case is any sort of common culture, or at least a common culture with more depth and value than Survivor and "Dancing with the Stars.)