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However, we don't have to wait till that day comes to have peace in our own hearts. "My peace I leave with you," says Jesus. "I can give you a supernatural peace and security, a supernatural love and joy that you've never known, if you put your confidence and your faith and trust in me."

The second illusion that I think millions of Americans hold is that economic utopia is the answer to man's deepest needs. Advertising has sold us a bill of goods and created an expectation gap. We're told that if we use a certain kind of deodorant or a certain type of soap, well find happiness and peace and serenity and security. Well, suppose that all of us could have everything we wanted. Suppose there were two swimming pools in every home, three cars in every garage, a dozen chickens in every pot. Would that give us happiness and peace? No. Jesus said, "A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth." He also said: "Man shall not live by bread alone." Man has much deeper needs. Loneliness, emptiness, alienation, guilt, the fear of death -these are his real problems.

Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud, was asked why students riot and demonstrate. She replied: "The real reason is that fundamentally students are empty and alienated and theirs is a burning quest for reality." I spend a lot of time at colleges and universities, and I can tell you that one of the gut issues today on campus is the search for reality: "Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going?" Modem education is not answering these questions that bum in the hearts of millions of students in America and throughout the world. A friend of mine who is a film star has a son attending Berkeley. This boy came to his father recently and said, "Dad, I'm dropping out; I'm going to become a hippie." The father said, "Why?" And the son said, "Well, Dad, I hate you." The father was of course shaken by that. "Why do you hate me?" he asked. His son said, "All right, Dad, I'll tell you. You've made it too easy for me. I've had everything and you didn't give me anything to believe in. And I hate you for it."

We've given them the idea that material wealth is the answer—the higher the standard of living, the greater our happiness and peace. But our young people are rejecting that concept. They are lashing out and saying, "We don't want it. We're going to bum it down." German students rioting in Berlin last year said that they were rioting against socialist materialism. A materialism without a faith.

The third illusion I see prevalent in America today is the assumption that democracy can survive without a religious faith. The direction in which we are now going—toward total secularism and total materialism—will lead ultimately to suppression and dictatorship. When honesty, integrity, and morality go, democracy is in jeopardy. Marcus Aurelius once said: "When a people lose confidence in themselves, the society crumbles." We in America have become so self-critical that we are in danger of losing confidence in ourselves as a people.

Something very dangerous is happening: a vacuum is developing in philosophical America. It has many parallels to the situation in Germany in the late twenties and early thirties—many differences also, but many parallels. When a religious vacuum developed in Germany, Nazism moved in. Martin Gross, writing recently in the Miami Herald, says there is a new American religion. Some of its young practitioners ape the Jesus-look, he said. They make liturgical chants against war, racism, and poverty; they use marijuana as a religious opiate. "What of democracy's future in such a false religious environment?" asks Gross. The spirit of this new religion is anti-democratic, he says, for it supposes that truth, is magically revealed only to an elite following. It claims to know better than the people—a spiritual lie that imprisons man. America broke that lie when it created a republic and a democracy with its base in religion, says Gross. To yield now to an ancient falsehood with a fashionable new religion would be pure folly.

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October (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52