In the mid 1980s I had the privilege of working with the Gideon’s organization. Every Saturday, rain snow or shine, a group of us would meet for breakfast in downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan, to review assignments and plan the upcoming weeks. Although our conversations covered just about everything under the sun, I’d often hear these men, all of whom were older than I, express gratitude for God, family, and country. In that order.

However, they were also realistic enough to gently tamp down my younger-man’s exuberance about America. In my naiveté I still believed that, if one would scratch beneath the surface across the country, one would tap into a vast reservoir of appreciation for our roots, both colonial and early republic. By that I meant, surely, the great majority of Americans understood that the truths we regard as “self-evident” are so because of the religious tradition undergirding our beliefs and our very lives and that to reject that heritage would lead to tyranny and ruin. 

My colleagues would point to Scripture, which has plenty of examples of nations whose names now gather dust in forgotten manuscripts and unvisited libraries. Nations that knew the Triune God but did not honor him. The words of Daniel to Belshazzar come to mind. Even the nation of Israel was judged for her betrayal. Sadly, it is the nature of men and women to forget, to deny, to dishonor.

John Stuart Mill, the great relativistic thinker, assumed that Christian ethics are permanent and hence we can take them for granted. He provides yet another example proving that “great thinkers” are not often wise.

I recalled my friends from Kalamazoo when I read the 2022 Transparency International Corruptions Perceptions Index comments on Venezuela.

Venezuela’s foundations differed widely from colonial and early republic America. However, she did have a basis for understanding the source of her prosperity in the first half of the 20th Century, a time when she enjoyed high levels of economic freedom which produced an environment of numberless voluntary transactions and unprecedented years of well-being with high growth rates. In 1960, Venezuela’s per capita income, at 45% of the US per capita income, was the highest in South America while her growth rate was higher than even Germany’s. 

Her great economic success fueled the transition to democracy in 1959. However, her democratically elected officials immediately began to curtail her economic freedoms in favor of Socialistic policies which eventually led to contractions and, by the end of the century, ushered in an authoritarian Socialist regime that, like a protean, angry octopus, has its tentacles in every nook and cranny of Venezuelan’s lives. By 2013, even the Carter Center, albeit belatedly, acknowledged the Venezuelan “elections” to be a sham (my word, not theirs; I don’t have to be diplomatic). By then the damage was done and the fix was in, and continues to be in, to this day.

Oh, but there’s more.

Transparency International’s 2022 report ranks Venezuela as the most corrupt country in the Americas. That’s “most corrupt”, as in more corrupt than Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Her rulers are reliably accused of leading massive drug cartels and having extensive ties to major international criminal organizations. Incredibly, illegal businesses account for 21% of Venezuela’s GDP. And her mining, especially gold and diamonds, are controlled by criminal groups who, with impunity, extort, enslave, prostitute, and murder the inhabitants, mostly defenseless indigenous peoples. 

In other words, Socialists are grossly guilty of what they delight in accusing Capitalists and Christians (they purposefully interchange the two).

In my youth, I would often hear the older generation’s assurances that Venezuela would not go the way of Cuba or Allende’s Chile. That she understood very well that liberty created her prosperity. As for her dalliances with Socialistic policies since 1960, those were very limited and did were not slippery slopes. I wanted to believe such assurances, even though my own family history said otherwise. Cuba, where my father was born, was also an economic miracle which went the way of all flesh practically overnight. At the time I did not know enough to ask my elders what made Venezuela any different; what would keep her from doing likewise.

And I certainly was not aware of Venezuela’s deeply infiltrated military, in cahoots with Castro and determined to rule Venezuela in Communist fashion, tyranny and all.

Venezuela “understood” where her prosperity came from. However, she ditched it nonetheless. 

The United States appears to be doing the same, with even less excuse.

Mourning the death of a child. In addition to the griefs which are the common lot of all, these peoples have been abused, murdered, displaced, and enslaved. Countless have fled to unknown destinies in Brazil.

Mother and children in Brazil after fleeing criminal attacks in Venezuela’s mining arc.

Plaza Colon in Caracas, Venezuela, circa 1950

Caracas boy, circa 1950