When I made my odyssey drive in February down the Florida Gulf coast and then back up the Atlantic side via beach route A1A, I mostly listened to Christian radio stations.

I remember one preacher going on about what horrendous times lay ahead of us now that America has fully abandoned its Bible-based Christian heritage. He said something like, “Do you even half-way realize how bad it’ll be not even five years from now?!”

When I decided to leave Manhattan for rural Alabama last fall I admit I had this naïve idea that in the heart of the “Bible Belt” I’d see just how old-fashioned fundamental Christianity still prevailed in a culture.

I quickly learned this wasn’t the case at all. The county I lived in, for example, is recognized as one of the top five Crystal Meth capitals for the whole country!

As for the churches, the apostasy there appears as full-blown as anywhere else, given what I saw on local TV (in televised local sermons), read in the local papers and observed through my own journalistic methods.

One Sunday evening, for example, I visited a tiny storefront church—that billed itself as “King James Independent Fundamental Baptist”—and heard the young preacher loudly rattle on in dramatic Pentecostal-style how “my God is my God” and each of us had our own “my God.”

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In a great newsletter quarterly article posted online last month by national Bible teacher Keith Blades (www.enjoythebible.org), he succinctly summarizes what Believers can expect going forward.

Blades writes, “Man’s ungodliness will not only continue to evolve, but it will worsen. In particular man’s emphasis will be upon proudly promoting himself and his achievements like never before.

“Accordingly, therefore, rather than acceding to the truth of evolving ungodliness, man will boldly and increasingly protest against any such thing. He will profess evolving humanness, and will describe the ‘course of this world’ as one that shows him achieving mastership over it. In support he will point to his impressive achievements in areas such as scientific knowledge, discovery, advancements, invention, technology, exploration, culture, society, quality of life, and the like.

“In short, man will become more and more impressed with himself and with his accomplishments. Wherefore he will define the present ‘course of this world’ in terms of man’s evolving greatness, as he defiantly denies the truth of his evolving ungodliness and fervently works to replace it with a substitute reality.”

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Blades goes on to say that with the “growing darkness” that will accompany the man-devised alternative reality, “it should become all that much more apparent to us that ‘the wisdom of this world’ is useless and worthless to us.

“But more than this, we should begin to clearly see that it is not only fraught with the foolishness and emptiness of ungodly men’s vain imaginations, sophistry, and corrupt reasoning, but that any attempt to incorporate any of it into our sonship education actually will do damage to our edification and to our vocational training. Hence we should recognize that it is harmful and even dangerous to us.

“In like manner should we also become increasingly disenchanted with, and so unimpressed with ‘the fashion of this world.’ For this world’s criterions for determining what is meaningful in life, what is noble, what is honourable, what is worthwhile, and the like, are clearly not founded upon godliness.

“Instead, ‘the fashion of this world’ is primarily and predominantly hedonistic. As such its pronouncements regarding what can bring a person happiness, satisfaction, and contentment, and therefore what makes one’s life full and rich, are founded firmly upon the pursuit of carnal pleasures, and the acquisition and possession of material things.

“. . . Now though we naturally should not be favorably impressed with any of these "works of darkness," the expectation is that as we are taught more about them we would become even more unimpressed with them, perceiving them to be even more distasteful and detestable than what we first recognized.”