A free country will always have debate and differences of opinion. But that debate becomes dangerous and destructive when the differences strike at the core premises that define the very existence of the nation. When we can no longer agree about who we are, what we stand for and why we exist, our very existence comes into question.

The country is divided today by those who see injustice as a problem to be defined and solved by politics and those who continue to see injustice as evil defined by Scripture and dealt with through repentance and self-correction.

When the issue of slavery tore apart our nation, most Americans were church-going citizens. The dividing line then was between those who saw slavery as a sin and those who did not.

As Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, delivered as the Civil War raged, “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other.”

But today the division is between those for whom religion is relevant and those for whom it is not. The latter, overwhelmingly, are on the political left.

The recent Wall Street Journal/NORC polling on national values shows the picture clearly.

Of those who say religion is personally “very important,” 27% of Democrats say yes and 53% of Republicans say yes.

Of those who say patriotism is “very important,” 23% of Democrats and 59% of Republicans say yes.

Many are now shocked to see how politicized our universities have become. But the data shows that this is not a problem limited to our universities; it reflects broader, deep changes in our society.

Injustice has become a problem relegated to politics as religion has increasingly been purged from our society.

DEI — diversity, equity, inclusion — is a tool designed by secularists, who produce their own definition of injustice and then design their own quantitative tool to solve the problem they have themselves defined.

President Ronald Reagan gave one the nation’s great speeches in March 1983 to the National Association of Evangelicals in which he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”

Reagan said then, “But we must never forget that no government schemes are going to perfect man. We know that living in this world means dealing with what philosophers would call the phenomenology of evil or, as theologians would put it, the doctrine of sin.”

Speaking about the then-Soviet Union, Reagan said, “Let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the State, declare its omnipotence over individual man … they are the focus of evil in the modern world.”

With the surge to the left in our country, and the purge of the influence of religion, we have produced our own “government schemes,” pretending they will “perfect man” and solve our social challenges.

The result is the ongoing expansion of government and a burden of national debt and government spending that is crushing us.

Reagan quoted William Penn saying, “If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants.”

This is where we are today.

Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education