There isn't a genuine Christian in America that I know of who isn't concerned about the moral quicksand into which our country is slipping. The more we struggle, the faster it seems to slip. What was abominable two generations ago is absolutely expected as "good" today. (I did not use the wrong term there. It is not only accepted as good; it is expected. As in, "Who doesn't live with their potential spouse before they get married? It's the only wise thing to do!") And while we continue to raise the cry and work against this decline, we don't seem to be holding any ground at all.
As I've examined over the years the question of "Why", I've found something interesting. Why, for instance, is it that a term like "gay marriage" makes perfect sense in 21st century America when in mid-20th century America it wouldn't have had any meaning at all? Why are more and more children of Christian homes previewing marriage with cohabitation? Why is divorce on the rise and radical feminism leading the charge? And more importantly, why is it, when we rush to staunch the moral hole here or there, we can't seem to make headway? As I've examined these types of questions, I've come up with a disturbing answer. I have met the enemy and the enemy ... is us. No, I'm not talking about Satan. Sure, he's our enemy. But in terms of the moral decline of America, we have only ourselves to blame.
Why is that? Well, I'm quite sure, for instance, that we don't leap from "marriage" clearly meaning "man and woman" to "whatever two people you wish it to be" without some obfuscation in between. Before you can make that leap, you have to obscure what "marriage" means at all. Marriage is the fundamental building block of society, comprised of a committed husband and a committed wife who are dedicated to having children, to forming a family (and it is assumed that they will typically have more children than is required to replace them). Look at that sentence and tell me how much of it has changed today. Hillary has assured us that the fundamental building block of a society is ... the village (a contradiction in terms), and we were okay with that. "No fault" divorce erased the "committed" term from marriage. Now couples approach their upcoming nuptials with plans for the future that include divorce. They sign prenuptial agreements. They decide not to have kids because "What guy wants to marry a girl with kids?". They actually invite other people (generally via videos) into their bedrooms to spice up their marriage because, after all, commitment can't be enough, can it? And children? Oh, no! Well, maybe one. Two at the most. We don't need large families. Those folks with more than two are a matter of entertainment to us because, well, it makes no sense! No, no, children are optional ... at best. So we -- yes, even we Christians -- have stripped off commitment, dedication, and offspring ... and then wonder, "Why are we having to work so hard to defend marriage against this homosexual invasion?" We've contributed to that.
I could go on with other illustrations, but that's the idea. When Satan came knocking at the underpinnings of morality, we didn't think it was that important as long as the top level looked fairly clean. Christians in the first half of the 20th century, for instance, would have been horrified at the thought of contraception -- and it wouldn't have just been the Catholics. But, thanks largely to the '60's, most Christians today are horrified at the suggestion that contraception may not be God's idea of good. Sex, after all, is all about pleasure, isn't it? (You know that one didn't come from God.) Sex is about satisfying our own desires, right? (That one surely didn't come from God.) "So what are you suggesting ... we should engage in ... self-control and selflessness? Oh! (Shudder) You're asking too much!!" I don't know about you, but in the echoes of that protest from Christians I can almost hear, "Did God say ...?"
I know Christian wives who are deeply concerned about our culture's moral decline. They are anxious to vote on important moral topics, happy to send their husbands on men's retreats to be godly men, and outraged at the sin at their front doors (and sometimes closer). They home school their children to keep them safe from the evils of the world. Yet, when you watch them for any length of time, it turns out that they don't love their husbands and refuse (yes, refuse) to respect him. "Respect has to be earned" they tell me despite God's direct command to the contrary. And when marriages collapse and the world sees the death of the family in the Church, they're baffled and confused. "These things ought not be!" No, they ought not. But when you point a finger at a problem, you have more fingers pointing back.
I know Christian husbands who are doing the very same thing. They are angry and frustrated with the moral decline of our nation. They will campaign to stop it. They demand that their wives respect them and beat them (emotionally, mentally, verbally or otherwise) for failing to live up to God's command. They are leery of women's retreats because they might lean toward the evil of feminism. And they can't figure out why the world around them can't find a light shining in the darkness illustrating what biblical marriage and biblical manhood looks like. "It's Satan's fault!" they complain with accusing finger outstretched. But when you point a finger at a problem, you have more fingers pointing back.
I wonder if we don't just have too many fingers on each hand.
Or could it be that, when we rightly recognize a problem in our society's moral fabric, we're not looking in the right place for a good part of the problem. Could it possibly be that we've bought the world's lies about what is right and wrong and not even know it? If that were the case, then it would simply facilitate a faster moral decline in our society ... which, oh by the way, seems to be what we see, doesn't it? Maybe we need to check our fingers more carefully.
11 comments:
I'm going to have to start pointing with all my fingers :P
Good thinking! That will certainly solve the problem of our own culpability, eh?
50 years ago… …let's see, racism, women treated unequally, rampant discrimination, etc.…
Everyone wanes nostalgic for the "gold old days", but the "good old days" weren't as selective perception often frames.
Stephen Pinker:: The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.
Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has profound implications. It is not a license for complacency: We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future, since the world has never before had national leaders who combine pre-modern sensibilities with modern weapons.
I'd say decline of violence is an excellent marker of a moral world.
Naum,
I am, frankly, stunned. You ignore (not analyze and respond to) any argument that Dr. Mohler might offer because you disagree with his position on the war in Iraq and the like, but you tout Stephen Pinker as a good source, a self-avowed anti-theist (not merely an atheist, but a militant one). If this is your version of consistency, then I'm worried.
As to your arguments (I prefer not to discount arguments, even if they come from sources with which I may have issues -- the very definition of ad hominem), I never suggested that the world was perfect 50 years ago. But did you know, for instance, that black Americans had a faster, higher rise in income and productivity before the civil rights movement than after? I'm not suggesting in the least that racial discrimination is a good thing. I'm simply offering the possibility that sometimes our measuring tools are inaccurate.
Last thought here. My point was that Christians' failure to be what they ought is often the cause of the problems we bemoan today. It appears that you're disagreeing. Really?
I just don't buy the proposition that the world is less moral today than it was 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1000 years ago, etc.…
Pinker's religious beliefs have nothing to do with the empirical evidence he puts forth. Nowhere am I claiming that he's a paragon of virtue and a model for morality.
Mohler, OTOH, is a denominational leader that is consistently prattling about on issues of morality, yet is encumbered (lest I add the "in my view" preposition to acknowledge my own fallibility) by some rather severe moral lapses that fly in the face of Jesus gospel.
"Pinker's religious beliefs have nothing to do with the empirical evidence he puts forth."
Statistical evidence? Evidence that, say, the FBI or the CDC denies? Statistics that can, say, be interpreted based on, oh, I don't know, one's personal religious beliefs? (We've seen this before. One fine example was when they argued that abstinence training did nothing to affect sexual behavior ... by studying biased sources.)
And it's still logically inconsistent to admit Pinker's data regardless of his view but omit Dr. Mohler's arguments because of his views.
Census Bureau statistics tell us that in 1960 the crime rate was 1887 crimes per 100,000 people. By 1980 it had peaked around 5950 crimes per 100,000 people. The rate dropped some after that and oscillated a bit. In 2002 (the last of the data available), the crime rate per 100,000 people was about 4118. In terms of violent crimes, the low in that time frame was 158 per 100,000 people in 1961, the high was 758 per 100,000 people in 1991, and the 2002 rate was 495 per 100,000 people. Statistically, then, crime rates in general and violent crime rates in particular were lower in 1960 than they are today. The overall crime rate in 2002 was more than double the crime rate in 1960, and the violent crime rate in 2002 was more than triple the rate in 1961. In terms of trends, the crime rates, either general or violent, have never dropped below 1960/61 levels. The increase peaked in the 80's and dropped off in the mid 90's. If we measure morality purely in terms of crime rates, it would seem obvious that morality today has deteriorated from morality in the '60's.
Dive down too deep into metrics and statistics, and your vision can be obscured by number crunching minutiae.
Don't dispute your statistics.
They detail what's reported, not what happened.
Police accounts only record what was officially logged. Lots of things today, that are entered as "crimes" would not have even been bothered with by law enforcement.
For one example, until the last 50 years, women were in complete subservience to men. What a man said, that's what went down. A man could legally beat his wife — even when such behavior was frowned upon, it still didn't rise to the level of "domestic abuse" until the rise of feminism.
In the 1960s, in most of the nation (not just the South, but also in rural areas and even some urban enclaves), if you were not white, you were banned from establishments or segregated into lesser accommodations.
I wonder how many lynchings and beatings doled out to minorities and white civil rights workers were officially tallied as "violent crimes"? I'm guessing not very many, especially in the south. Or if you are gay and get the snot beat out and threatened with your existence on a daily basis because you are "unnaturally" different. I doubt many of those got recorded. Or a woman, subjected to her husband's anger and beatings, but afraid to come forth and report, not just for fear of retaliation (which is still a factor today), but equally significant factors such as stigma on divorce and limited availability of economic opportunity to make a living.
Then, in later years in the 1960s, came a great deal of social unrest. And violence.
When we look at history as a long arc, it's bent towards justice. It ebbs and flows, but the long term direction has been mostly positive. To claim otherwise, means you haven't studied history in any depth, even recent history over the past 100 years.
Every generation, it seems, laments that the current age is more immoral than a previous age.
On your post's contention that "we have only ourselves to blame" — is true, but certainly not in the way you detail. It has little to do with gay marriage or contraception. It has a lot to do with selfishness, consumerism, disregard for the poor, injustice, etc.…. Some of which is manifested in what you describe, but that's not the big picture.'
Advocating for restoration to a culture and context of a past age is the equivalent of running into a wall. We don't live in the world of Ozzie and Harriet anymore. We don't live in a world where the family farm/ranch enabled us to be mostly self-sufficient. We're more interdependent than ever.
Yes, no doubt, you're going to reply with a charge of relativism, but that's not what I'm saying. No, not advocating "anything goes" or the discarding of biblical wisdom. Just that it's a lot more nuanced than bumper sticker sloganeering. That such "wisdom" has morphed with Christ followers as they've interpreted the scriptures to suit their own predilections.
It's about faith, hope, and love, which unites all. And manifested via justice.
"They detail what's reported, not what happened."
Ergo, my statistics are not to be trusted, but the guy that is setting out to prove that there is no God and morality needs no basis with his statistics is right. Got it. Clear enough.
The point of the post was to warn Christians that we are to blame for moral shifts in our society. I actually thought you'd agree. But apparently you either think that Christians have no such blame or there has been no shift. In either case, you appear to be trying to absolve Christians. Nice of you.
Stan,
Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I did say you were generally correct (regarding Christians themselves being to blame), but for the wrong supporting details and off the mark in claiming it's (which every generation has done) less moral today than in previous generations.
And your "proof" that today is just as moral as yesterday is Stephen Pinker's assertion that there is less worldwide violence?
I would suggest that just about every generation (it's not true that every generation has done it) has held that there was a decline in morals because there was.
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