The Inauguration Speech America Needed

Editor's Note: As this magazine goes to print, the inaugural speech of the President of the United States of America is still scheduled for January 20, 2021. If it did, indeed, take place as planned, then many of you reading this issue will have already heard it.

While we here at Tomorrow’s World do not involve ourselves in the politics of this world, we must still ask: Was it the speech the U.S. truly needed from its Commander in Chief? Did the President stand behind the lectern, facing a divided and contentious nation, and say what that nation needed to hear?

For your consideration, we offer you here the inaugural speech we believe the President of the United States should have given—a speech that summarizes the true challenges facing the nation and describes the only real solution to its current woes.

My fellow Americans, I come before you today humbled by the scope of the task ahead of us and the responsibility you have bestowed on me to guide our nation through the next four years.

As I take office today, I cannot but consider that the One who blessed this nation, the God who has used our country as a tool in His hands to fulfill so many of His purposes in the world, has been increasingly working to get our attention.

If the decades leading up to last year were warning shots across the bow of our Ship of State, 2020 was a shot through our hull. Perhaps not enough to sink us—time will tell. But it was a blow devastating enough to erase any delusional hopes that we are somehow invulnerable to destruction—powerful enough to remind us that we are at risk of disappearing beneath the waves as so many nations have before us.

Passionate individuals on both sides of the political aisle claim to have the solutions. Some desire that we rush headlong into progressive and socialist policies, seeking to turn our nation into a paradise of humanism. Others claim that only a return to the political wisdom of our founders and a conservative view of the Constitution and limited federal government is the answer. Neither philosophy holds the solution we need, because our most fundamental problems are not political, philosophical, or economic.

Our problems are spiritual in nature. And they are most simply described by a word that is no longer in vogue, though it is more relevant today than it has been for generations. That word is “sin.” America is plagued by national sin.

We are a nation that purposely kills its children as they grow in their mother’s womb—what should be the safest space of all.

We are a nation that celebrates sexual anarchy and denies the witness of both science and Scripture that we have been made male and female, each designed for the other.

We are a nation that devotes its health industry to seeking vaccines against the sexually transmitted infections that run rampant among us, all while rejecting the morals that would end these problems once and for all.

We are a nation that has turned politics into a religion, political disagreement into a new sort of blasphemy, and difference of opinion into a cause for zealous and fanatical hatred.

We are a nation torn apart by growing racial and ethnic tensions, rejecting the one truth that should unite us: that human beings are not “evolved animals,” but special creations of God made in His image.

We are a nation that virtually worships freedom of speech, yet uses that freedom to be the largest producer and exporter of pornography in the world—all while increasingly seeking to restrict that freedom for those among us who would confront us with uncomfortable truths.

These sins, and so many others, are consuming our nation. They ravage our lives more than any virus, and they devastate our cities more than any riot. Left to grow unabated, these sins will destroy our country, and there is no policy or political party that can save us from the consequences of turning our backs on our Creator.

But, my friends, we are not powerless in the face of these sins. The Almighty once told King Solomon that “if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

I cannot provide the healing we need—no president can. No branch of our government, no matter which party runs it, can provide that healing. It can come only from our Creator. And He has, in His mercy, made the path to that healing absolutely clear: We must humble ourselves, we must turn from our national wickedness, and we must seek His face.

My fellow Americans, we must turn toward God and away from our sins. I must turn. You must turn. We must seek His face while we may still find it—before it is hidden from us and our fate is sealed.

And so, as my first official act as the President of the United States, I choose to follow in the steps of one of my greatest predecessors, Abraham Lincoln. More than once, during the dark days of the American Civil War—when our young nation struggled to find its conscience and its sons were spilling their life’s blood on our own soil, fighting each other—President Lincoln, together with members of Congress, appointed a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer, to seek the face of God. On one of those occasions, in 1863, he proclaimed:

We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.

In light of these facts, he said, “It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness,” and he declared his hope that “the united cry of the Nation will he heard on high, and answered with blessings, no less than the pardon of our national sins, and the restoration of our now divided and suffering country to its former happy condition of unity and peace.”

My countrymen—my friends—we cannot right ourselves without the divine aid of our nation’s Almighty Benefactor. I hereby request that our new Congress stand with me and declare a Day of National Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer one week from today. On that day, let us, as a united people, look beyond our differences and our selfish ambitions, and look to Him, His laws, His ways, and—above all—His Son. Let us ask His forgiveness, beg for His guidance, and request that He lead us to turn from our selfish and evil ways, so that we may become the nation He longs for us to be.

If He will hear, if He will pardon, if He will heal, we have hope. If He will not, no power on earth will be able to prevent what is coming.

I pledge to you today that I will strive daily—in my choices, in my words, and in the character I display as I discharge my duties—to convince you to turn to the Almighty, who may yet save our nation if we allow Him to do so. May God help me in this task, and may God bless the United States of America.