Many years ago, the police union in our city went out on strike, I think legislation has since been passed preventing it from happening again.

The union said police would still deal with major criminal offenses, but were refusing to enforce minor things like traffic violations or vandalism.

For the first couple of days, everything continued normally. People obeyed the traffic laws.

But as time passed it slowly began to break down. People started running red lights if there was no oncoming traffic, and eventually they were doing it even if there was.

Even if the light was green, I remember deliberately slowing down as I entered an intersection, because I just didn’t know if someone would be barreling through the red.

And I also felt the temptation to run a stop sign or red light, particularly if the oncoming street was clear.

As the strike continued, bedlam ensued.

People started drag racing each other on the city’s main thoroughfares. You would be driving down the street and suddenly two cars in front of you would slow down until they were equal. Then they would hit the gas and squeal away in a thunder of noise, smoke, and the smell of burning rubber.

Eventually it became organized as people started blocking off the city’s main street, so they could hold drag racing events. The police union true to its word did nothing.

With no accountability, everyone was tempted to varying degrees to break the traffic laws. With no one holding us accountable, traffic morality broke down.

This leads to an interesting survey conducted by Pew Research in the spring of 2022 which found that 65% of Americans believed “it’s not necessary to believe in God to be moral.”

Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe they can live a moral life without the need of accountability to God.

Not surprisingly, the results varied depending on how religious a person was. If religion was basically unimportant to a person, then 90% agreed that you didn’t need to believe in God to live a moral life.

But even for those where religion was important 51% believed God was not necessary to live a moral life.

There was also a difference based on a person’s politics as 71% of Democrats said they could lead a moral life without believing in God compared to 59% of Republicans.

While it’s true governments can impose laws and extreme punishments forcing us to lead a moral life of sorts, how does a person behave when there is absolutely no chance of being caught.

Do they act morally or are they willing to bend the rules?

After Israel demanded that they be ruled by a king, instead of a prophet, God had the prophet Samuel anoint Saul as the country’s first king. But in Deuteronomy, God gave strict instructions to future Kings, stating that they were subject to the laws of God (Deuteronomy 17:18-20).

The Kings were not above God’s law. They had to obey it like everyone else.

But it wasn’t just God’s law that was the problem.

One of the main stipulations of the Magna Carta, written in 1215, which was a major stepping stone towards the development of our modern democracy, it stipulated that the Kings were subject to their own laws as well.

If the King’s parliament passed a law saying it was illegal to steal, that law also applied to the king. Many times these tyrant kings treated these laws as simple guidelines.

When you have absolute power, and are accountable to no one including God, it is easy for a ruler to think he is above his own laws.

This is why I wrote several articles on government leaders who brazenly broke the very COVID rules that they were forcing their citizens to obey.

• READ: Politicians who broke their COVID lockdown rules

Perhaps the best example of what happens when we remove God from morality is by examining what takes place in countries where atheism rules.

How do their leaders function when there is no accountability to God?

According to the Black Book of Communism, China’s communist leader, Mao Zedong, had no problem slaughtering 65 million of his countrymen.

Under Joseph Stalin, an estimated 20 million people died under that atheistic leader.

Pol Pot killed an estimated two million people in Cambodia when he brought in communism. This included killing anyone who wore glasses because it indicated they could read.

As we watch God slowly being removed from our cultural conscience, we need to ask have things gotten better or worse?

READ: Many people in U.S., other advanced economies say it’s not necessary to believe in God to be moral