Do Conditions From the Historic Decline of Rome Foretell America's Future?
A commentary by John Ross Schroeder
Good News senior writer, United Kingdom
Posted October 22, 2009
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time to time able historians have drawn anxious comparisons between the
notorious decline of the Roman Empire and the current amoral path of the
United States. During the last four years, eight major books have been
published about ancient Rome's demise. First consider these seven:
- The Ruin of the Roman Empire
- The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the
Barbarians
- The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization
- Barbarian Tides: The Migration Age and the Later Roman Empire
- Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West
- Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire
- The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower
All of these titles are modern additions to Edward Gibbon's classic
late 18th-century work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
One of the most compelling reasons for writing historical accounts of
past civilizations is to learn from their tragic mistakes—seeking
not to repeat them today. Alas, for the most part modern Westerners
behave like "now people" who do not read much history in
spite of the tireless efforts of concerned historians.
Current global and national trends have made some insightful observers
predict that we are now sailing into very dark and troublesome waters.
No wonder these knowledgeable academic authors have recently focused
on the fallacies of the ancient Roman Empire. It lasted for more than
400 years (roughly from 27 B.C. to A.D. 395), swallowing up much of
the known civilized world at that time. Four of these seven modern writers
express their concerns about the current decline of our Western world
and to some extent relate the causes with those that severely disabled
Rome—eventually bringing it down.
Painful parallels
The eighth author, Cullen Murphy, puts it much more explicitly. He
asks the crucial question in his title: Are We Rome? The Fall of
an Empire and the Fate of America. He draws obvious comparisons
between our very questionable behavior and that of the inhabitants of
ancient Rome. The parallels are painfully obvious.
Our current moral conduct, particularly in societal relationships like
marriage, should cause us the kind of deeply concerned anxiety that
hopefully would lead to a radical reform in our individual and national
behavior. Rome started out with reasonably stable marriages and disciplined
sexual conduct, but deterioration set in as the decades slipped by and
conditions came to resemble our modern version of illicit sexual behavior,
both inside and outside of the marriage relationship.
The demise of the Roman home is well documented. Such sources as E.B.
Castle's Ancient Education and Today show that "the
consequent easy attitude to the marriage tie, the increasing frequency
of divorce, and growing freedom and laxity in women's morals" guaranteed
that the once stable Roman family unit did not endure (p. 15). Another
writer spoke of an epidemic of Roman divorces.
Plain warnings
Learning critically important lessons from secular history has a parallel
in our spiritual need to heed the plain warnings of biblical history.
The apostle Paul wrote: "For whatever things were written before
[in the Old Testament] were written for our learning" (Romans
15:4). He was much more specific in his first epistle to the Corinthian
Church. "Nor let us commit sexual immorality, as some of them
did, and in one day twenty-three thousand fell... Now all these things
happened to them as examples, and they were written for our admonition,
upon whom the ends of the ages have come" (1 Corinthians 10:8,
11, emphasis added).
 If the United States as a nation continues down the rutty road of disobedience
to God's basic spiritual law, are we staring at the fate of the
ancient Roman Empire? We can help you discover the biblical answer if
you will read or order our free booklet The
United States and Britain in Bible Prophecy, and especially
the chapter on "From
Punishment to Destiny."
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