AMERICAN TRADITIONS AND THE NEW RADICAL CULTURE CHANGE
COMPARING AMERICA’S PAST WITH THE PRESENT REVEALS A CULTURE MUTATION WHICH IS A REVERSION TO MANY OF THE PRACTICES AND BELIEFS OF THE ANCIENT PAGAN WORLD
When we talk about traditional American values or “family values,” what we are really referring to are Biblical values. From the beginning our nation’s basic philosophy of life and norms for behavior were saturated in ideas and values from the Jewish-Christian Scriptures, because the elementary and secondary educational system in America, even through the 1950’s, taught values which had their roots in the teachings of the Bible, This was the heritage handed down to us by our Founding Fathers, who themselves knew and quoted regularly and extensively from the Bible. John Quincy Adams summed it up in an address to a 4th of July celebration in 1821. He said, “The highest glory of the American revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.” Noah Webster, called America’s Schoolmaster, and many other American leaders and educators in the 18th and 19th centuries were insistent that the Bible be used and taught in American schools. The Northwest Ordinance required that religion and morality be taught in the schools systems of any territories that had ambitions to become new states. So the Bible had been used and taught especially for its moral instruction in American schools at least until WWI. It was even read each day or often offered as elective study in some high schools until 1963. Dr. W.A. Early, the president of the National Education Association, in the early 1950’s, stated that the morality taught in the public school was still based on Biblical values.
There was a gradual, growing secularization of American education in the 20th century, but a very radical change occurred in the 1960’s when the Supreme Court interpreted the establishment clause of the First Amendment to mean that anything religious, particularly official prayer and the use of the Bible, had to be deleted from public education. Separation of church and state had always been accepted as a fact in America, but this was a new and extreme application of this concept. No substantial precedent could be cited for these radical decisions, and they were obviously contrary to and in conflict with all previous practice from the time of the Founding Fathers until 1962. Culture radicals have sought to extend this new theory into many other areas of our American society relegating Christians and their ideas to the sidelines.
At the same time there was a revolutionary culture change, which was partly initiated and paralleled by a radical change in music style and volume, widespread sexual promiscuity, and indulgence in mind altering drugs, which became a symbol of the younger generation’s rebellion against past traditions. It was a conscious, rapid, purposeful evolution illustrated in many minds as the ushering in of a new age, which some called the Age of Aquarius. Its roots, however, were in the halls of higher education which had more and more become captive to the ideals of atheistic secular humanism even since before World War I.
This was a fanatic mutation characterized primarily by a quest for a new kind of liberty; namely, freedom from all traditional restraints. This was done in the name of the American tradition of liberty and First Amendment rights. In fact, it used the same terminology, but this movement was not in the original American tradition. It was such an extreme interpretation of American ideals that it has become a completely new mutation. Essentially it amounted to a rebellion against and rejection of the “laws of nature and of nature’s God” which had shaped, however imperfectly, the traditional culture of America. In its place the “new culture” introduced a new hedonistic philosophy of freedom and all of its pagan accompaniment: (1) sexual promiscuity (ritual prostitution); (2) abortion (child sacrifice); (3) the exaltation and worship of man (idolatry); (4) and an aggressive homosexual agenda (the civic virtue of Sodom and Gomorrah).
The obvious discontinuity of this new cultural mutation with past American traditions is proved by the fact that the followers of what some call this “new age philosophy” actually hate the traditional American heritage and wish to expunge it. There is even an effort to rewrite American history by using pseudo-scholarly additions and deletions and distortions of facts.
These culture radicals are substituting an entirely new value system and lifestyle which used to be found only in the “back alley” subculture of America. The fact of the matter is that those who stood at the extreme left of this counter culture of the 1960’s have produced more “sleaze and filth” than has surfaced in our studies of the old pagan cultures. A lot of the contemporary popular literature boasts much more grossness, obscenity and indecent perverseness of culture than the classical pagan writings. Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and others were discreet by comparison. The popular media culture has produced in the theater, movies and TV much more violent, ugly, and prurient stuff than we know from the ancient pagan world. New advances in virtual reality technology and participation TV will outstrip any kind of ribaldry and smut the pagan world could have even conceived. Although Christians considered pagan art as “fleshly”, worldly and devoid of godliness, it showed far more discretion than some of the garbage that pretends to be art in our Western world today, much of which would have “grossed out” even the “civilized” pagans. The muck, slime and sludge that passes for lyrics in today’s rock and roll and rap songs would even have shocked the Caesars. This has all been promoted in the name of a perverted philosophy of freedom. The Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko recently stated it wisely and succinctly, “Freedom is wonderful if we know how to handle it. We don’t, and it’s just going to get worse.” (An excellent authoritative statement on the “seaminess” of the American popular culture can be found in Michael Medved, Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values. New York: Harper Collins, 1992)
This shift in values has finally precipitated a heated cultural warfare in America, which is growing in intensity. It is an uncompromising, irreconcilable stand-off that threatens a genuinely serious future conflict between all who recognize this as a dangerous and destructive cultural mutation and those who support this new revolution who are called the culture elite, culture radicals, many of whom at heart are anarchists. Conservative Christians and Jews see in all of this a revival of the paganism and infidelities of the past. They feel like they are confronting pagan Rome, Greece, Egypt, Canaan and the barbarians of Europe in modern dress all over again. They also view it, and correctly so, as the chief cause of America’s “descent into degradation,” the astonishing growth of social pathologies and the massive moral disintegration which has taken place in our nation in the past thirty years.
THE CHARACTER OF THIS CULTURAL MUTATION: THE NEW PAGANISM.
The culture radicals are trying to make America a very comfortable place for “sinners” and their supporters and a very uncomfortable place for “saints” and their allies.
(1) They coddle criminals (a) because they are hung up on a new philosophy of rights, which says man belongs to himself, not to others and not to society, with an accompanying belief in a “do as you please” kind of liberty that exists apart from social responsibility and (b) because they have an unrealistic, idealistic humanistic belief in the basic plasticity or goodness of human nature. (Their support for the new crime bill was weak on retribution and discipline and heavy on prevention and rehabilitation, which was an excuse to load the crime bill with “pork.”
(2) They indulge homosexuals and their “alternative lifestyle,” and may even wink at pedophilia and child pornography. (Witness new Justice Department guidelines.)
(3) They encourage sexual promiscuity, which used to be considered sexual immorality, calling it natural and amoral. Some have even called teaching sexual abstinence criminal.
(4) They promote child sacrifice by unrestricted abortion. This gives priority to the “right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness” at the expense of the “right to life.” At the same time they are claiming to favor a vigorous defense of the rights of children which would eventually remove children from parental jurisdiction--Hillary’s and Donna Shalala’s Children’s Defense Fund.
(5) They push self-expression and pro-choice agendas except where the choice would not be theirs, such as parental choice for education for their children and individual free choice for health care.
(6) They allow and defend pornography, adult bookstores, and all varieties of “girlie joints” and “male stripper” promotions and other prurient practices in the name of First Amendment freedoms. (Adult “entertainment centers” in New York City, e.g., have increased from a total of 9 in 1965 to 177 in 1994.) Some culture radicals have even seriously advocated the legalization of drugs, such as marijuana, cocaine and heroin, which is becoming the new epidemic in America.
(7) They promote a “do-as-you-please,” “anything goes,” unrestrained hedonistic philosophy of freedom which results in the interpretation of civil liberties as self-centered, self-indulgent selfishness, which is the simplest theological definition of sin. They have used the arm of the judicial system of our government to create new laws supporting their indulgences and prejudices, bypassing legislatures and the overall will of the American people. This is creating a society which will some day be ungovernable. We may someday beg for tyranny to control disorder, for we will have traded our Bibles for bayonets.
Contrary to their own professed value of tolerance, the culture radicals of the pagan left, who accuse Christians of being bigoted, are guilty of their own brand of bigotry and even persecution.
(1) They call concerned Christians hate-mongers, haters of liberty and Bible bigots when they teach the morality of the Bible, the Ten Commandments, and the belief that has been taught in America for years; namely, that Jesus is the only way to God, which has always been the teaching of the Christian church from the days of the New Testament. (“There is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved.” Acts 4:12)
(2) They hate the Gospel message and hate Christians whom they style the “radical right.” They are bruised and offended when they are called the “pagan left” because they are viewed as returning to the beliefs and practices of paganism promoted by the mystery religions and by those who opposed Biblical morality in ancient Rome, Greece, Egypt and Canaan.
(3) They ridicule any condemnation of promiscuous sexual behavior which they classify as amoral. Some of the only moral restrictions they can abide come under the category of “safe sex.” (Most successful cultures at least in their beginnings have exercised controls on sexual practices for the sake of healthy families and the reproduction of the society. Following Jewish teachings, Jesus and Paul place sexual license at the top of the list of destructive social sins and thus established what is called Christian morality.)
(4) They deride any teaching that says the two parent family is normative for human society and advocate and encourage as many as 14 different varieties of families previously considered “broken” or dysfunctional. This is in spite of the fact that sociologists are proving that the two parent family is “best for the kids” and that the dysfunctional family in America is the
number one cause of all our social pathologies--violent crime, decline in education, illegitimacy, teen pregnancies, divorce, increase in drug and alcohol use, etc.
(5) They hate the American heritage and tradition because it is unabashedly Christian in its presuppositions and origins. They want to replace the melting pot, which was based primarily on the Jewish-Christian value system (traditional American mainstream values) with a multicultural mix where any and all beliefs and allegiances are equal, and where it is politically incorrect to question any one else’s opinions or motives. (So tolerance becomes “the last remaining virtue of a failed society.”)
(6) They approve Native American, Eastern, occult, mother goddess and other New Age religions but wish to enforce a “freedom from religion” when it comes to traditional Christianity. They would like to confine “religious freedom” to its expression within the four walls of the churches and homes by inhibiting, or even prohibiting, as much as they can, the access of Christian ideas to educational institutions and public forums. They consider religion irrelevant and would wish to exclude it from the public arena or table of discussion and now even from the workplace. (Note recent EEOC directives.)
(7) The most extreme culture radicals wish they could erase any memory or vestige of our Judeo-Christian heritage in America (a) by banning military, legislative and prison chaplains; (b) by deleting references to God from our money and in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag; (c) by a religious cleansing of public buildings, monuments and libraries, including the banning of any displays of the Ten Commandments or religious pictures; (d) by eliminating all voluntary prayer or Bible reading during free time in schools, and the singing of Christian songs, including Christmas carols, in schools and public places; (e) by taking down all public religious displays and symbols including Nativity scenes, Jewish Menorahs and the Christian symbol of the cross in all advertising and even as cemetery monuments; and (f) rescinding tax exemption for churches and religious organizations. Many hate the Bible, which was the basis for our most cherished American traditions and heritage, and wish in their hearts that they could immolate all volumes in a huge book burning.
Rev. James M. Murk