America is not, on the whole, an atheist nation. Polling still shows large majorities professing belief in some kind of higher power. What it has become, however, is something arguably more dangerous than secularism — a culture that has refashioned God into a flattering reflection of itself, a deity so manageable, so endlessly affirming, and so reliably silent on inconvenient subjects that He can no longer command reverence from anyone. The question worth asking is whether such a god is even worth the prayers being directed at him.
That is precisely the question pastor and author Adam B. Dooley puts to his readers in a striking new essay at The Christian Post, titled “Are we inventing a fake God? Why reverence is dying.” Dooley revives a warning from the late theologian R.C. Sproul, who observed before his death in 2017 that the most urgent spiritual need of the age is for people to rediscover who God actually is. Nearly a decade later, the diagnosis has only sharpened. Few in the modern West openly reject God. Far more are content to invent a new one.
Dooley calls this tendency what it is — a quiet idolatry of preference, in which the living God of Scripture is shrunk down to a more manageable size. We prefer a deity who stays in the background, who shows up on cue, who treats us as the center of the universe, and who keeps his opinions to himself when ours run in another direction. This god takes marching orders. He does not give them.
- Pastor Adam B. Dooley argues that modern Western culture is not rejecting God outright but reinventing Him into a smaller, tamer figure who poses no real demands.
- Drawing on Isaiah 6, Dooley contrasts the contemporary preference for a domesticated deity with the biblical vision of a holy, untamed, sovereign Lord.
- The seraphim of Isaiah’s vision did not chant “love” or “mercy,” though God is both — they chanted “Holy, holy, holy,” the attribute that defines His essence.
- Modern American spirituality often reduces God to a life coach, co-pilot, or affirming friend, stripping away holiness in favor of comfort.
- Without holiness there is no Gospel — the cross is meaningless if sin is merely a misunderstanding rather than a real offense against a real God.
- The death of reverence is not just a theological problem but a civilizational one, with downstream effects on respect for institutions, authority, and truth.
- Dooley points to Isaiah’s confession — “Woe is me, for I am ruined” — as the response holiness demands and the response modern religion is unwilling to make.
- Many today demand affirmation and punish dissent, treating disagreement with their preferences as a moral offense.
- The biblical answer is not a softer God but a sovereign One whose holiness makes grace meaningful in the first place.
The God of Isaiah 6 Has Not Changed
Dooley grounds his argument in Isaiah 6, the prophet’s vision of the Lord enthroned in unapproachable majesty while seraphim cried out, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.” The setting matters. King Uzziah had just died after more than half a century on the throne. Judah was anxious, uncertain, and politically unmoored. When the prophet looked up, he did not find a God pacing nervously or scrambling to keep pace with the news cycle. He found a God reigning, undisturbed, glorious, and entirely unimpressed with the panic below.
That picture alone should embarrass much of what passes for popular Christianity. The seraphim, Dooley notes, did not chant “love, love, love,” though God is love. They did not chant “merciful, merciful, merciful,” though He delights in mercy. They selected the single attribute that most completely captures who He is — holiness. The threefold repetition is no accident. It is the Hebrew way of saying that this attribute is supreme, definitive, and without rival.
The implication is uncomfortable but unavoidable. A God who is first and foremost holy cannot be reduced to the man upstairs, the cosmic therapist, or — that most unfortunate evangelical phrase — our co-pilot. He is not a mascot. He does not cheer our ambitions regardless of their direction. He is, in the language of Hebrews, a consuming fire.
The Therapeutic Deity Cannot Save
Sociologist Christian Smith famously diagnosed the religion of younger Americans as “moralistic therapeutic deism” — the belief that God exists, wants us to be nice, wants us to feel good about ourselves, and shows up only when we need something. That description was offered in 2005. Two decades later it reads less like a diagnosis and more like a settled creed across enormous swaths of American religious life, including denominations that still wear historic Christian labels.
The fruit is on full display. A megachurch pastor in Kansas City recently announced a congressional campaign on an openly pro-abortion platform. An Episcopal diocese in the American South just installed its first openly lesbian bishop. Entire denominations now treat the plain reading of Scripture as an embarrassment to be explained away. None of this would be possible if the God being worshipped were still recognized as the holy, untamed Lord of Isaiah’s vision. It is only possible because a different god — manageable, flattering, infinitely affirming — has quietly taken His place.
The trouble is that the therapeutic god of modern preference cannot do the one thing his worshippers actually need. He cannot forgive sin, because in his presence sin is not really sin. He cannot transform a life, because he has no standing to demand transformation. He cannot save, because there is nothing to be saved from. The cross becomes a sentimental decoration rather than the place where the wrath of a holy God was satisfied on behalf of guilty men.
The Psalmist Saw This Coming
Israel’s ancient temptation was not unbelief but reinvention, and the Lord addressed it directly through the psalmist. “These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself: but I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes” (Psalm 50:21).
The verse cuts to the bone. The God who has not spoken loudly on our timetable is not the same as a God who agrees with us. Silence is not endorsement. And the day will come when He sets the record straight.
That single line ought to send a shiver through any honest believer. The temptation to remake God in our image is not new, but the resources for doing so have multiplied — social media affirmation, niche theological subcultures, denominational decline, and a broader cultural reflex that treats personal preference as sacred and contradiction as cruelty.
Reverence Is the First Casualty and the First Necessity
Dooley closes with a piercing observation. The contemporary world does not lack opinions about God. What it lacks is reverence. Many laugh at the idea of holiness. Others rewrite reality wholesale, calling evil good and good evil. Still others demand affirmation as a precondition for civil discourse and punish any disagreement as bigotry.
This collapse of reverence does not stay neatly within the four walls of the church. A culture that cannot revere God will not long revere parents, teachers, magistrates, the unborn, the elderly, or the truth itself. The vertical disorder produces the horizontal one. The civilizational symptoms now dominating headlines — the contempt for institutions, the obliteration of basic categories like male and female, the casual cruelty of online life — are not unrelated to the disappearance of the holy from public imagination. They are its downstream consequences.
The remedy is not a softer God or a more attractive theology. The remedy is the recovery of the actual one. The Gospel of Isaiah 6 — and of the entire New Testament that flows from it — is that the God who is too holy to overlook sin loved sinners enough to bear it Himself. A burning coal from the altar touched the prophet’s lips and his guilt was taken away. Centuries later, the same fire of divine holiness was satisfied at a Roman cross, where Christ became sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
That is not a god we invented. He could not have been invented. He is the One we have always needed, whether we knew it or not. And the first step back toward Him is the one Isaiah took when the throne came into view — the recognition that we are unclean, the willingness to say so out loud, and the courage to stop pretending we are doing Him a favor by showing up.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
