A "Fourth Turning" is a deadly event an entire nation goes through…around every 80 years....according to Strauss and Howe, who published a 1990s book by that title. Because America has experienced several of these "fourth turnings," the authors predicted MATHEMATICALLY, a quarter century ago, that America would enter another severe, killer catastrophe right about now...falling deeply into a crisis of crime, amorality, darkness, uncertainty and estrangement from a previous moral high ground.

If we look back 80 years, and keep looking back another 80 years, sure enough, America went through five life-and-death crises in 1623, 1703, 1783, 1863, and 1943. And 80 years later here we are again in 2023... without dependable standards for law, justice, order; without definitions for family and gender; without economic stability; without honest coinage, without international friendships, without an orderly military; without Biblical literacy; and every man is doing what is right in his own eyes. And almost every man is getting it wrong and is hurtling headlong along a downward trajectory.

But didn't America make the turn out of all those other crises? Yes. But those turnings were led by humble and repentant leaders who had developed a reverence for God's ways and God's laws. Unless such men appear on the scene today, and are followed in a new and redemptive direction, America will not make the turn. History is not so cyclical that God is obliged to keep to some mathematical calendar, or numerical pattern. He keeps to his covenant promises. If a nation turns, he helps. If a nation does not, the cycle is broken. Not by God, but by the stiff-necked, lawless citizens who refuse to turn around, and the nation descends further and faster into its own willful extinction.