The world is going through a major change right now, and most people don’t even realize that it is happening. The change that is occurring will have lasting effects on our society and world as a whole. According to CNN, currently, there are the same amount of non-religious people in America as there are Catholics and Evangelical Christians, with each group making up 23 percent of America’s religious landscape. For 20 centuries, Christianity has been the guiding force of Western civilization. Even as recently as the childhood of our grandparents, Christianity provided answers to deep questions about ethics and morality. The loss of such a powerful philosophy has the potential to plunge America and the rest of the Western world into complete chaos.

Since the early 1990s, the number of atheists in America has been steadily rising, and they are projected to be the largest religious group within four to six years. The rise of atheism is a relatively new phenomenon. Consider how 200 years ago, blasphemy was a punishable crime. During the 1920s, alcohol and gambling were illegal. When our grandparents were children, divorce almost never occurred (townhall.com). Today, atheism has never been more popular and many of the moral platitudes that guided America throughout its history are diminishing.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian soldier during the Soviet Union, spent several years despairing in a concentration camp, trying desperately to think of a reason as to why he got in the awful situation he was in. Years of bloody revolution and murder had wrecked his homeland. Eventually, he came up with the reason for his predicament: I “Men have forgotten God, that’s why all this happened,” he wrote in his landmark novel “Voices From The Gulag”.

When people forget that there is a power higher than them, what is going to stop them from tearing up the moral fabric of our country? What’s stopping murder from being a sin? With no guiding philosophy like Christianity, how will we answer the moral questions that we have been asking all throughout our human experience? Every American needs to answer these questions as atheism continues to grow, or else we may find ourselves descending into the same murder and chaos that the Soviet Russians had to live through.