HOW GOES IT WITH AMERICA AS A CIVILIZATION?
l. We have taken the lead among civilized nations in almost every social pathology, such as violent crime, prisons, teenage pregnancies, divorce, illegitimacy, and drug abuse.
2. We have the lowest family formation of any of nation in the Western world. Close to 30% of our adults are living alone. Divorces have increased 400% since 1960 and many are unwilling to make a commitment to marriage or children. All 50 states have no fault divorce laws which places in America less restriction on divorce than any other nation in the world.
This has become what I believe is our number one social sin because of its consequences for the next generation.
3. Our students rank at or near the bottom in testing in math, science, geography, and most other subjects as compared with students from both Western Europe and Asia. In some instances we are surpassed by or are no more proficient than students from third world countries.
4. In the mainline churches and reformed synagogues a morality of “tolerance” has replaced the standards which used to be considered “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” We have deregulated the “Ten Commandments” and taken them off our schoolroom walls and out of our traditional pulpits. The Episcopal Bishop Spong of Newark has said that the Ten Commandments are immoral. Tolerance is the last moral law of a failed society.
5. The philosophy of freedom of the Founding Fathers; namely, rights “endowed by a Creator” to whom one owes responsibility for the gift of liberty--self-government guided by self-control
--has been largely discarded or ignored. In its place the First Amendment is read as a philosophy of freedom similar to that taught by the French revolutionaries. This is a “do as you please,” “anything goes” kind of liberty promoted by agnostics like John Stuart Mill and his philosophy of utilitarianism. This point of view measures all values in terms of individual human pleasure or the pursuit of happiness. Morality and virtue are therefore considered relative to whether or not they make men happy. Usually happiness in this case is evaluated in terms of the satisfaction of human desires or passions. It is based in a radical individualism which pits individual human rights against the rights of families and the greater society as a whole or what has been called the “common good.” In its extreme form it teaches that man belongs only to himself, not to family, and not to society, and certainly not to a God who does not exist.
6. Liberal political philosophy in America has borrowed much from the teachings of Karl Marx, the father of socialism and the hero and “god” of Communist theory. Liberal Democrats and their friends in academia believed in Big Government and collectivism. They were always very friendly to the Soviet experiment and expected it to succeed. (Even the CIA as late as the 1950’s, being fed false information, believed that the Soviet economy was growing by 9% a year and would soon overtake the USA.) Accepting the assumptions of atheism, most regarded religion as irrelevant and still do. Leftist-liberals have tried to put a democratic face on Marxist ideas, but it has only resulted in masking a totalitarianism which would force political correctness, promote speech codes on American university campuses, dominate American education so as to control the minds of America’s children, and federally regulate the minutia of American lives and businesses. These are some reasons why over 60% of Americans have become disaffected by the present federal government, considering it a potential enemy and not a friend.
7. The acceptance of Marxist assumptions has resulted in the denial of absolute divine law, or rules of God for human behavior, which is the heart of the Judeo-Christian value system--the traditional heritage of America. This has important implications for the new libertarian philosophy of freedom, because “if God does not exist anything is permissible.”
Karl Marx made a point of saying that if a universal global community was going to work, the world had to get rid of Judaism, because conservative, Biblically faithful Jews believed that they had a mandate from God and possessed absolute truth. The German philosopher Hegel had said the same thing because Judaism would not fit his dialectic. Hitler picked up on these ideas and tried to eradicate the Jews as Marx had suggested must be done, although Marx perhaps did not mean genocide should be the method. It is obvious that conservative or evangelical Christians, who believe that the Bible is the Word of God and speaks to man in absolute terms, would also have to be eradicated. This was the next goal of Hitler and was always the goal of Marxist communists. Today the leftist liberals in America will do all they can to inhibit both orthodox or conservative Judaism and conservative Christian faith. They view the threat of the exclusivism of Biblical faith to be a grave threat to multiculturalism and globalism; hence outspoken Christians are derided as Bible bigots.
8. The new spirit of radical individualism has undermined America’s care and concern for its children and consequently its entire future. Abortion claims the lives of one out of three children. Of those that are born, one out of three are born to unwed mothers. Illegitimacy rates which used to run 3% in America are now 23% among whites and 68% among blacks and more than 80% in the inner cities. This is the dynamic dysfunction which is driving most of the welfare system in our nation. What is more, over 50% of America’s children will live with only one parent during all or part of their growing up years. It is a main tenet of feminism that it is their fundamental right to have children without the responsibility of a husband and father.
9. The welfare machine in America has undermined independence, self-reliance and the work ethic of at least two generations of families. Most illegitimate babies will be on welfare from birth until adulthood. Many fall victims or become involved in violent crime, drug addiction, negative gang behavior, educational failure, poverty, and a repetition of early, out of wedlock childbearing. Most sociologists are agreed that the dysfunctional family is the number one cause of all our social pathologies. These social ills have increased in direct proportion to the growth of the welfare state in America.
10. Children are obviously not considered our society’s first responsibility even among most responsible two parent families. Careers and the making of wealth are valued over child-rearing. Young children are being brought up in crowded day care centers, or by illiterate nannies, and the TV performs the chore of babysitting up to seven hours per day. All of this disorganization and pathology has left our children’s lives in rotten shape; “. . . the climate and prospects for youth development in our society is bad.” The very future of a viable American civilization is threatened.
11. Economic and administrative problems are being addressed by conservatives who have become the political progressives in contemporary American society. (The liberals have had their fifty years of power. They have made vast changes in the American system and have imposed a whole new set of values and disvalues on American culture. They are now in reality the conservative supporters of the status quo.)
The Republican revolution wants to rid our society of the aspects of the Federal government which have become a parasitic nuisance. Some goals: (1) Clean up the welfare mess; (2) Lower taxes, which at 50% of one’s income overall have almost become confiscatory--”It’s our money!” (3) Replace the IRS and bury it; (4) Make all prejudice, including the “affirmative” reverse discrimination kind, illegal; (5) Check the arrogant destructiveness of over zealous environmentalists and other regulators; (6) Curb the excesses of tort lawyers and our whole litigious legal system; (7) Balance the Federal budget in at least seven years; (8) Remove wasteful, redundant government departments and bureaucracies and reduce the size and cost of government substantially--even as much as one-half. It has been discovered that more people are employed by federal, state and local governments in America--18 million strong--than in all manufacturing jobs combined.
12. Reforming the economy alone, however, does not reach out and touch our deepest national problems--education, crime, the quality of public culture and public life, and the moral consciousness of the nation. Remember the political puns, “It’s the economy, stupid!” and the reply “No! It’s the culture, stupid!” Instead of being concerned for morality in the old-fashioned sense, the leftist liberals, especially on the university level, treat most social problems, even violent crime, as health problems and want to deal with them under the category of public health. The idea that all social problems are really moral problems has been purposely censored and hidden by liberal leftists. This is because morality has been a department of religion, and leftists consider religion as irrelevant, or even dangerous. Religion, however, created the virtues, promoted them, taught them, and wove them into the warp and woof of the entire culture. None of our Founding Fathers believed that there could be morality without religion. Many political philosophers, including even Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, have said that only a large-scale pervasive spiritual revival can reverse the plunge of American society into the destructive abyss of moral oblivion.
13. America’s spiritual greatness was our most cohesive and dearest communal possession. As Toqueville wrote in his Democracy in America, “Religion is the most important of the political institutions of that country.” He believed that this explained why the American society was superior because religion was the basis for morality. Even as late as 1940 America had good, disciplined public schools, admirable government institutions, very little street crime, strong public morals and morale, clean and safe black urban neighborhoods, clean cultural centers, safe inner cities, and governing elites and even most intellectuals treated religion with respect. No one debated family values because they were taken for granted. A general consensus supported Judeo-Christian or Biblical values as the basis of education and social and ethical mores.
14. From the time of the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights until 1947, there was never any obstruction to any community’s prescribing what role religion should play in America’s schools, government or public places. Neither was there ever any threatening effort to unite church and state. The new fanatic and extreme interpretation of the separation of church and state by Hugo Black in 1947 and the Supreme Court in 1962-63 and the years following was a value forced on American culture by secularists, atheists, and agnostics who had achieved positions of legal power. What the liberal leftists, including the Communists in the Baltimore school decision Murray vs. Catlett in 1963 could not achieve through constitutional legislative means they managed to finagle through sympathetic jurists on a very liberal Supreme Court.
More than any other group activist secularist jurists have been responsible for changing America from a Judeo-Christian community to a neo-pagan culture.
As a liberal journal proclaims in its title, it is a “New Republic” leftists are trying to create. It certainly bears no similarity in principle or spirit to the Republic begun by the Founding Fathers. In denying prayer and the Bible to public schools, which had been initially introduced with emphasis by our Founding Fathers, the Supreme Court ignored all judicial precedent and created a new law. Robert Bork called it “judicial lawlessness.” The pagan judges in essence said that they knew better than the Founding Fathers what the First Amendment really meant, and that America had been wrong for over 175 years. It is significant, considering the Marxist leanings of American leftist-liberals, that the new phrase “separation of church and state” only appears in the constitution of the Communist USSR and, of course, does not appear in the Constitution of the United States. So is it not from Marxist socialism that they got their inspiration for a new, radical interpretation of the “establishment clause” of the First Amendment?
With the demise of the USSR, there is now far more freedom to share Judeo-Christian values, or even the Bible, in Russian schools than in the schools of America. In fact, Russian ministers of education have expressed themselves as aghast that America has adopted and is repeating the mistakes of the old, failed Communist state. If they could have their way, furthermore, leftist liberals in America, who are predominantly atheists, would remove all religious expression, influence, and symbols from public life. These are the expressed goals of the ACLU whose founder Roger Baldwin is honored and enshrined in the Kremlin. This leftist liberal objective is identical to the USSR’s limitation on religion to show its face only within the four walls of homes and churches.
15. Liberals knew that they could not enact their agenda through legislation, so they have relied on the Courts to activate their programs into laws. They have used the courts to frustrate popular sovereignty--government of the people, by the people, and for the people--many times. Judicial nullification of elections and referenda have set a dangerous precedent elevating the authority of the judiciary over even the executive and legislative branches of government. One would think that we were ruled by an oligarchy of nine individuals of which only five are needed for a majority rule. Recent examples of the judiciary directly obstructing the will of the people include inhibiting the following “people driven” decisions: (1) Proposition 187 which sought to control illegal immigration in California; (2) The Gay Rights referendum in Colorado; (3) The English only law in Arizona; and (4) The anti-flag burning legislation of the Congress.
There is no declaration in the Constitution allowing the judiciary to exercise this outright usurpation of the people’s power rendering local and state governments powerless. In fact the 10th Amendment virtually forbids it. As Chief Justice Burger wrote in one of his minority opinions, the Court was violating the separation of governmental powers by usurping the right to create policy or laws. Over and over again “black robed judicial social engineers substitute their own legal interpretations for the will of the people.” This elevates the social opinions of the reigning judiciary above the law and the Constitution. Many believe that the jurisdiction and power of the judiciary must be limited by a Constitutional amendment to protect the democratic process.
16. There is a dangerous transfer of power in America from accountable institutions of democracy to unaccountable ones, such as the courts, the executive bureaucracy which creates its own laws, and even international conferences, such as the UN conferences on the environment and women, which presume to lay the basis for an international law to which all nations by treaty will subscribe, such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which limits both parents’ and a nation’s rights in training and disciplining its children.
17. Since the congressional elections of November 1994 the leftist liberals are losing their power base. If the Republican revolution extends to the election of a conservative Republican president and an increase in the numbers of Senators and Representatives who are conservative, the liberal vision for a “New Republic” will be sharply curtailed and their changes of the last 35 years in the American system will be radically reversed and brought more in line with the “original understanding” of the Constitution. (There is a genuine chance that over 60 Republican Senators and over 260 Representatives could be elected in 1996. The importance of electing a Republican president is heightened by the fact that the next four years may see the required appointment of at least three new Supreme Court justices as well as many other federal judicial appointees.) Watch the leftists pull out all the stops by any fair means or foul to prevent being completely overwhelmed in the elections of 1996. They will lie, cheat, ridicule, and malign and use every possible subterfuge and manipulation of the media to get their own way. They are a formidable minority, controlling most of the media and the popular culture, except for talk radio and CSPAN, CBN and CNBC. At this moment probably over 90% of the press and TV media and also the Hollywood crowd would vote to reelect Bill Clinton and the leftist-liberal ticket. Along with their tutors, the academicians, they hated Ronald Reagan and held him up to ridicule every time they dared. This point of view cannot help but manifest itself in prejudiced reporting. They still try to trash the Reagan years.
18. The conservative revolution is not a grass roots reaction against the old liberalism of FDR and JFK but against the leftist radicalism which grew up on the 1960’s and whose programs have failed and whose policies and dogmatic utterances violate the sensibilities of a majority of Americans. The old coalition of labor, blue collar workers, the South, minorities, Catholics and Jews has been shattered. Only organized labor union leaders, blacks, and liberal Jews still sit squarely in the Democratic camp. To these have been added the majority of university academics, radical feminists, homosexuals, Afrocentrists, the power brokers in the radical organizations like the National Education Association, the ACLU, the PAW, other members of the Rainbow Coalition and most of the purveyors of the print and TV media and the popular culture. They are a powerful elite, but they have become the minority. They themselves regard earlier liberals, such as Hubert Humphrey and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. almost on a par with or as bad as contemporary conservatives. The old and venerable liberal movement in America has been captured and is held hostage by the radical left.
19. Republicans have therefore claimed a majority of blue collar workers who have reacted against the welfare mess. They have staked out a growing preponderance of control and influence in the South, which has reacted against leftist antireligion, pro-gay, pro-feminist, and dictatorial environmental policies and gun control. A growing number of blacks are becoming conservative as they become competitors in the American middle class and see the disastrous results of leftist policies in the inner cities. A majority of Catholics voted Republican in November 1994 because of the leftist stance on moral issues. A new formidable coalition within the very powerful right wing Christian Coalition of Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson (1.7 million strong) has recently joined forces of evangelicals together with conservative Catholics. This has greatly alarmed traditional mainline church denominations who are predominantly liberal having discarded much of the orthodox Christian belief and culture.
20. The basic philosophy which unites the leftist radical liberals is their antagonism to all the old traditions which can be grouped under Western culture and our American heritage. As Bill Bennett has said, “The culture elite hate the American heritage and tradition.” They reject the idea that children should be educated in their heritage or that America is a product of Western culture. They want to change America into a different kind of nation stressing our diversity or multiculturalism not our unity. They reject the old idea of the “melting pot” meaning the suffusion of Western traditions, religion, political philosophy, history, and literature throughout the body politic. A few years back the Rev. Jesse Jackson led a demonstration of 500 rebels against the curriculum of Stanford University with the chant, “Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Western culture’s got to go.”
They overemphasize the role of blacks, women and Hispanics in a concerted reaction to the white male culture of the past. All western culture is white male; therefore, why study it? Radicals simply want to trash it including Milton, Shakespeare, and all the greats of history and literature. The English department at even Georgetown University recently junked the emphasis on these literary works as required for a major in English literature. Core curriculums in universities have been completely rearranged. They want ethnic and gender equity and quotas, welfare entitlements, reproductive rights, which includes unrestricted rights for gays and for abortion. Their militancy takes the form of academic speech codes, limits on scientific inquiry which might undermine their dogma, encouraging the use of multiple languages, promoting new emphases in history classes downgrading the role of white male Western culture and stressing female-centered, Afrocentric and Hispanocentric curricula. Complete sexual freedom in education and exercise is one of the most controversial of the radicals’ causes which are rejected especially by parents and religious moralists. The latter would point out that both Jesus and the Apostle Paul place sexual immorality at the very top of their list of sins or destructive human behavior.
The leftist liberals would also subordinate America’s national interests to a global imperative or multilateralism which would bring all nations under the dominion of a world body, such as the United Nations. Leftist hostility is leveled primarily at the West and specifically at the values of Western religion or so-called Christian culture. All who oppose them are labeled racist, sexist, patriarchal or homophobic. Their agenda is “way out” and their tactics are aggressive, even to the point of being vicious. They do not play by any rules and will lie, cheat, and manipulate without conscience in order to maintain their power base. The mendacity in the liberal political polemic of the past few months is proof positive of this assertion.
21. There is no opposing group which the liberal leftist radicals hate more than conservative Christians known by them as the Religious Right. It is because these conservatives stand foursquare for the old morality and principles supported by a Biblical ethic. It is this moral base which the leftists have rejected since the 1960’s. Also the Religious Right have had a very small minority of visible, militant groups within their ranks which have aggressively opposed abortion with demonstrations, picketing clinics and generally disrupting the abortion industry in the name of a constitutional “right to life.” There has been much animosity and “unchristian” expression on both sides. A small minority of activists has given leftist liberals an excuse to classify all the Religious Right as bigots. Four primary accusations are made against them
(1) They are a serious threat to the Republic--meaning to the new philosophy of freedom as a “do as you please” ethic which the leftists equate with the Bill of Rights. This vision which the left has of a “new republic” bears little resemblance to the original America. It is therefore the Left who are the real threat to our Republic.
(2) They are more dangerous than Communists. This is an interesting accusation reinforcing the fact that the leftists do not fear Communism with whom they share many of the same basic assumptions concerning human nature and human society and government. They fear Christians who wish to recover the heritage passed on to this nation by its Founding Fathers, a heritage which contemporary liberals hate and are constantly changing and reinterpreting.
(3) They want to destroy the public school system. This is an extreme accusation which should be restated as follows: Christian conservatives would like to see the public schools under local and parental control cleansed of the liberal propaganda which the National Education Association seeks to impose on America’s school children to turn them all into little liberals. They want to see honesty in the teaching of science and history and basic morality, which was always taught in American schools until the 1960’s, restored to its proper emphasis in the school program. This includes the Puritan and Victorian values, if you please, of hard work, diligence, respect for man and God, good manners, self-discipline, responsibility, dependability, faithfulness, loyalty, or the virtues which characterize Plato’s “good man” and in the Bible, a “righteous man.”
Our Founding Fathers did not believe that the Republic could survive without the teaching of virtues like these to each succeeding generation. According to the Northwest Ordinance, Article 3, they insisted that this should be the responsibility of the schools. Conservatives are adamant in their demand for school choice for parents. They are vehemently opposed to the monopoly and vested interest of an education industry which sacrifices our school children to its own ambitions and substitutes indoctrination for education. The liberal approach has produced deplorable results in the education of America’s children in the past thirty years. Instead of admitting its failure, the education monopoly Education must be viewed as a huge business in America. It is driven and motivated by much more than educational purposes and ideals. The monopoly over the public schools of the education vested interest lobby and hierarchy must be broken. Conservative Christians are not therefore against the public schools, but rather oppose those who would use them to advance their leftist-liberal causes.
(4) They want to impose their values on American culture. This is a farcical accusation considering that the leftist liberals have been aggressively imposing their values on American society and seeking to change it into something else at least since the 1960’s. The Religious Right would like to see our nation operate more in line with the principles of the traditions of its Founding Fathers and according to the “original understanding” of the meaning of the Constitution which has been vigorously violated over and over again by liberal jurists and the whole Federal government for the last 50 years. It is no secret that Constitutional Law has nothing to do with the Constitution but is simply a body of jurisprudence of judges who have increasing often made up their own laws according to their social philosophies. We have departed from the Constitution exactly as we have departed from Biblical ideals which made up our Judeo-Christian heritage. The Constitution is not even considered “the Law” by liberal legal minds today. The values of the Religious Right are the old, tried and true values of our American heritage handed down to us by the original settlers and founders of the colonies and our nation. How can Christians be accused of wanting to “impose” these values which have always been our American heritage?
22. Most conservatives believe that all social problems are moral problems. Morality can be defined as human thought and action which can be governed by codes of conduct and considered right or wrong, proper or improper. It is what makes up the human character that enables human beings to get along successfully in a viable, healthy, reproducing society. The concepts moral and immoral might rather be designated by the terms constructive and destructive. In other words what contributes to the well-being of individual human beings and society is constructive or moral. That which detracts from, interferes with, prevents, or contradicts the well-being of individual human beings and society is destructive or immoral. Human government is that organization which society designates to promote or encourage the constructive or the moral and inhibit or forbid the destructive or the immoral. Government passes laws for this purpose. Contrary to some detractors, therefore, government is specifically in the business of legislating many moral decisions (laws) and enforcing moral behavior.
22. There are two major, critical differences between the radical liberal and the traditional conservative approach to morality which affect their views on government and society.
(l) The leftists are committed to moral relativism which denies that there are any certain or absolute standards. They believe that there can be many standards and all systems are equal. It provides for very flexible behavior and leaves the door open for each man to make up his own rules. This philosophy even became the basis for a public school promotion in the 1970’s called the “values clarification” program in which students were encouraged to make their own decisions concerning what was right and wrong. Teachers were not allowed to assist students in their decisions. Everyone was to make up his own mind. As Secretary of Education Bill Bennett observed that this became not a clarification of values but a clarification of wants and desires.
(2) The leftists have a naturalistic view of human nature. Man is completely plastic and is molded primarily by his environment. A bad environment will produce an unstable man; a good environment will produce a healthy, good man. This accounts for the liberal effort to throw money at any human problem in order to create a viable economic environment whether it is in housing, family life or education. Most would believe that man is basically good and will make good decisions if taught properly. They believe that environment of poverty, of course, is to be avoided because it is responsible for social disintegration. The only difference between the poor and the well off is that the poor do not have money. This can be easily demonstrated to be a false assumption. It is interesting that in the period of our greatest poverty with 25% unemploy-ment in the 1930’s there was very little crime or self-indulgence. Our problems are primarily moral not economic. This economic determinism, which is such a widespread premise today, come right out of Marxist theory.
23. The conservatives count many among their number who are fiscally conservative but socially liberal. By our definition these are not true conservatives. I would prefer to call them moderate liberals. Moderate liberals may hold views on morality and human nature which are akin to those of the radical liberals. Conservative conservatives have a much more common sense view of both morality and human nature.
(1) They believe that there are moral absolutes. One can know right from wrong. A majority believe that the Ten Commandments are not the ten suggestions, that morality must have a religious base. Religious conservatives believe that God has revealed rules for human behavior that man could not discover entirely for himself because of a “fallen nature.”
If there are absolute rules in chemistry and physics and for the workings of the physical universe, is it unreasonable to believe that there are necessary rules for successful human behavior and social relationships? An egoistic selfism is certainly not the answer.
(2) This leads to a completely different analysis of human nature. Religious conservatives (Jews, Christians and Muslims) believe that man was created in God’s image, but that this likeness to God was marred by man’s disobedience to the will of his Maker. This disobedience or decision to go his own way instead of obeying the Creator’s commands and following the Creator’s way is what the religious call sin. As the Jewish prophet wrote, “All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned everyone to his own way.” The simplest theological definition of sin is selfishness, which is at the root of all human problems. Selfishness is expressed in self-love, an emphasis on self-expression, and in self-indulgence.
These “self” values were promoted and glorified in the 1960’s when the traditional restraints of the Judeo-Christian or Biblical value system were thrown over by the younger generation. The youth in turn were joined by a host of adults for whom the traditional values were only social convention. This social rebellion simply illustrates the sinful nature in man, which by definition is the deep, intense desire that all men have to want their own way. This selfish nature has been canonized today in the new philosophy of freedom which says, “I can do as I please, as long as I don’t hurt anyone else.” The society that holds this view, however, finds as the French did following their revolution that this definition of liberty hurts everybody. This sinful nature of man is marked by rebellion against authority, primarily the authority of God, which is represented by parents, schools, employers, law enforcement, and all aspects of human government. The radical liberal philosophy of freedom has elevated the expression of human sin and the sinful nature to the august level of civil liberties. This is an anathema and totally contrary to our American heritage. The libertine philosophy of freedom is a caricature of the liberty which Jefferson called a “gift of God.”
24. Let us contrast the traditional American core values with those of the leftist liberals. “Self-sacrifice” was an American value which built this nation. It has been replaced by “self-indulgence.” “Self-control” was considered a virtue for a man’s advancement and for the common good. It has been replaced by the value of “self-expression.” We are taught in the popular culture that “greed is good.” “Selfishness” has thus been elevated to the level of righteousness. The “New Republic” has all its core values “upside down.” This is bound to cripple and ultimately destroy our society. Benjamin Franklin said, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious they have more need of masters.” The tenets of radical liberalism eventually lead to tyranny. It is the pattern of the totalitarian USSR all over again.
25. What is needed? What should be our future vision for America? The problem of destructive immoral practices in America is far greater than any economic problem we might ever face. In fact, if all the social, moral problems were ameliorated much of our annual budget deficit could be assuaged. Crime alone costs us over 300 billion dollars each year and so does the welfare entitlement program. (l) We need to remoralize our nation with “Victorian values” just as was accomplished in England from 1850 to 1900. (2) We need to resurrect the old-fashioned stigmas like shame and embarrassment which have served all societies as social and moral controls since time immemorial, and (3) We need to rediscover the “socially cohesive effects of good manners.” Crime is a major blight on America, but the decline in daily morality--honesty, loyalty, and fidelity--is much worse and even more destructive in that it undermines all levels of human society.
The new radical philosophy of freedom includes a freedom from commitment. The 1960’s saw a breakdown, in the name of self-expression, of commitment to marriage, to children, to the authority of family, church, law enforcement and government, and, above all, in commitment to God. We must have a revolution in human commitment. This is hard and it will hurt! Whether Americans can bring themselves back to a respect for traditional values, which are in essence Biblical, is moot. As Senator Moynihan said on Adam Smith’s interview program a year ago, “America needs a complete change of mind and attitude.” This is the meaning of the Greek word metanoia “a change of mind” which is translated “repentance” in the Bible. We need a change in the opposite direction of the 1960’s, which is as all pervasive as the influence of the counter culture on America today. For this to happen would be in the order of the miraculous.
A few final recommendations: Define the proper limits of rationalist scientific understanding which has become a new religion; reanchor law in morality; make pleasure a by-product not a goal; reassert the moral side of social problems instead of sweeping them under the rug; and redeploy social sanctions such as stigma and shame to keep society in order instead of only depending upon some external physical force. Finally, Americans need a resurrection of respect for the authority of God in the universe, which reaches down to influence their daily lives.
EPILOGUE
After the American experiment in self-government was initially established on the firm base of the Judeo-Christian philosophy and values, there were many challenges. This was especially true in the aftermath of the opposing philosophy of freedoms expressed by the French in their theses ”The Rights of Man,” which organized human behavior from a much more libertine point of view. From time to time there were rebels in American society, even atheists, who opposed the
obviously Christian basis for society, which they found too restrictive. This was addressed many times throughout our history even on the highest levels. Two examples were the challenge met by the House Judiciary Committee in 1854 and the Supreme Court study and opinion in 1892. They both availed themselves of the original sources--the writings of the Founding Fathers and the early history of this nation.
The House committee concluded from their research that the Founding Fathers were essentially Christian, and they expected that their philosophy would be taught to succeeding generations and would prevail. The Founders could not conceive that this experiment in self-government could succeed unless the majority of the people adhered to a Biblical morality. The Judiciary committee actually said that if the the Founders had ever thought that America would war against Christianity, they would have “strangled the American revolution in its cradle.”
In response to a challenge in 1892, the Supreme Court made a similar study of the documents of the past, They produced 87 quotations of the Founding Fathers and added that they could have come up with as many more. Their conclusion in their own words: “This is a Christian nation.”
With the influence of Spencerian evolution, the ideas of European thinkers like Marx and Freud, and the American John Dewey, the academic community virtually rebelled against our Judeo-Christian heritage. This climaxed in the great rebellion of the 1960’s. Today the products of that rebellion are our tenured professors, academic deans, teachers, lawyers, doctors, CEO’s, and politicians. So in the last 30 years we have seen a radical transformation of American society, which has been paralleled by the most horrendous moral breakdown suffered by any nation in history in so short a time. James Reston said that we went from “puritanism to hedonism in one generation.” Instead of facing the problems they have created, these new liberals, many of them leftists and radicals try to justify the results of their philosophy by propounding whole new theories concerning the family, social organization, academic life and curriculum, and political and economic philosophy. They relish their victory and will do anything to sustain the change.
The 1950’s saw the last semblance of traditional America. W.A. Early, president of the National Education Association, in about 1953 said that the morality which was taught in the public schools was essentially a Biblical morality. Today very little morality is taught at all, and the Ten Commandments and a portrait of Christ have been torn off the school room walls. In 1954 Governor, and eventually Chief Justice, Earl Warren made a statement which was published in Time magazine, February 15, 1954, p. 49 which stands today almost as a memorial to a culture which is moribund, rejected by many, and almost forgotten. He said,
“I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Saviour have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses. . Whether we look to the first Charter of Virginia, or to the Charter of New England, or to the Charter of Massachusetts Bay, or to the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the same objective is present; a Christian land governed by Christian principles. I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the Bible and their belief in it; freedom of belief, of expression, of assembly, of petition, the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of the home, equal justice under the law, and the reservation of powers to the people. I like to believe we are living today in the spirit of the Christian religion. I like also to believe that as long as we do so, no great harm can come to our country.”
Unfortunately, the spirit of the Christian religion, its teachings and its authenticity and authority is under vigorous attack, and our nation is in great danger of sacrificing its civilization on the altar of radical individualism and atheism.