TruthBook Religious News Blog

March 20, 2009

By Ken Connor

Americans appear to be losing faith in God and in our cultural institutions. Is the loss of confidence in one related to a loss of confidence in the other? The answer is unequivocally yes.

How we view God inevitably determines how we view our fellow man. And how we view our fellow man, in turn, determines how we treat him. Created in God's image or creature of chance? The answer makes a difference because what we believe determines how we behave.

America's Founders recognized the important role that a shared belief in God contributed to the stability of our society. Our second President, John Adams, said, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Adams' son, John Quincy Adams (our sixth President), declared, "This form of government... is productive of everything which is great and excellent among men. But its principles are as easily destroyed, as human nature is corrupted.... A government is only to be supported by pure religion or austere morals. Private and public virtue is the only foundation of republics." Both presidents — father and son — understood that a shared belief in God is necessary to produce the shared values required for a stable society. Belief in God was the foundation of the republic. The very freedoms and republican form of government we embrace today require society's acknowledgment of "the laws of nature and of nature's God" acknowledged by the Founders in our Declaration of Independence.

Unfortunately, shared belief in a transcendent God — the cornerstone of our stable society — seems to be eroding in America today. The recently-released American Religious Identification Survey is an overview of religious demographics in America. Preliminary results show an America rapidly losing its religious faith. Since the survey began in 1990, the number of self-identified Christians has dropped from 86.2% to 76%, and the number of people claiming no religion has risen from 8.2% to 15%. People are losing faith in God at a rapid rate.

As our shared belief in a transcendent God disappears, our shared moral values inevitably give way to a pervasive relativism. We no longer believe in common moral values, so social norms begin to disappear. Every man is a law unto himself. Radical individualism reigns. We should, therefore, not be surprised when our cultural abandonment of shared values manifests itself in the caveat-emptor business practices which have produced our current financial crisis or the forked-tongued politicking of politicians who will spin any lie or reverse any position in order to pass the buck and keep their jobs. Without shared moral values, every person makes their own morality.

Likewise, we should not be surprised to find that Americans' faith in our cultural institutions is also faltering. Without shared belief in God, social values disappear, social norms are abandoned, and we no longer know what to expect from institutions like the family, church, or state. According to the General Social Survey of 2008, Americans have lost trust in nearly every single major American institution. The recent poll asked Americans whether or not they have confidence in several cultural and political institutions. The preliminary results have just been released, and the picture is not pretty. Since 1976, Americans have lost confidence in every major cultural institution except for the military. This list includes the scientific community, financial institutions, organized religion, the federal government, the media, medicine, education, and major companies. The percentage of Americans expressing a "great deal" of confidence in organized religion has dropped from 32% in 1976 to 20% in 2008. Over that same period, confidence in the media fell from 29% to 9%. Confidence in Congress fell from a dismal 14% to an even more dismal 11%. Clearly we Americans are losing faith in our cultural institutions.

A shared belief in a transcendent God produces shared moral values which provide people with social norms that give them confidence in their culture. Without this core belief, the structure of society is undermined by man-centered relativism. An increasingly unbelieving people also suffer from a loss of confidence in one another. Having replaced faith in a transcendent God with faith in flawed human beings, they inevitably set themselves for disappointment and abandon the only moral basis for a stable society.

Only by regaining our shared faith in a transcendent Law Giver will Americans be able to recover our faith in our society.

Labels: ARIS, belief, faith, God, Ken Connor, morality, relativism

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Thursday, June 14, 2007

The real roots of crime

The Daily News

A new Ipsos Reid survey commissioned by CanWest News Service and Global National finds that half of Canadians think schools are more dangerous today than five years ago. They blame bad parenting, society's disintegrating moral fabric and violence in the media as the prime culprits. One-third of respondents identified absent, lax or poor parenting as the root cause of school violence, and about one-quarter citing a perceived "lack of morals, conscience and respect" as being to blame.

Only 15 per cent thought "gangs" are the primary cause of escalating violence in Canadian schools, and just 11 per cent blamed the availability of guns - notwithstanding the histrionics of anti-gun lobbyists and some fellow-travelling politicians such as Toronto Mayor David Miller.

Convenient scapegoats

The public gut differs from many politicians, the media and various special-pleading activists who continue to blame rising adolescent depravity on the Internet, guns, video games and Hollywood violence. These are convenient scapegoats for much deeper distempers afflicting our culture - ones the left/liberal, self-styled elites don't want to acknowledge or address.

The root of the problem is that an ideology of moral relativism has been uncritically assimilated by three or four successive generations, rendering many people incapable of judging right from wrong.

Interestingly, science tends to corroborate grassroots perception more than leftist social theorizing. In criminological literature, "bad" parenting is frequently portrayed as a risk factor for unhealthy social development and, in turn, antisocial behaviour.

For instance, a study by M.R. Gottfredson and T. Hirschi, A General Theory of Crime, (Stanford University Press, 1990) finds that a propensity to engage in crime is the prime cause of involvement in crime and deviant behaviours. It argues that ineffective parenting is the reason children fail to develop self-control - lack of which is a characteristic that persists across the lifespan, predisposing individuals afflicted to lifetimes of criminal behaviour.

Gottfredson and Hirschi contend that children raised in unstructured environments fail to develop the ability to control their behaviour, and are therefore prone to engage in risky behaviours that give them either a short-term reward or relief from momentary irritations. It is failure of parents to make the effort to instil internal control that leads to childhood, and later adult, misconduct.

The baby-boomer and boomer-shadow parents of today's crop of adolescents and pre-teens are arguably the most disastrously ineffectual cohort of parents in history. Steeped in the post-1960s cult of permissiveness and a constellation of other half-baked leftist notions, they have, in the main, failed miserably at executing their parental duty of nurturing ethics of civility, duty, self-control, and responsibility in their offspring.

Reflexive contempt for self-sacrificial virtue and rejection of real religion in favour of facile, feel-good "spirituality" have robbed these postmodern parents of the tools needed to combat the malignancies today's depraved popular culture inflicts on their children. Too many parents are themselves afflicted with "perpetual adolescence syndrome," identifying with their loutish kids against teachers and other authorities as agents of oppression to be opposed at every turn.

Christina Hoff Sommers, a philosophy professor at Clark University, says many of her students are "incapable of making one single confident moral judgment."There is really no such thing as right or wrong, they tell her. Each person has to work it out for himself.

"The trouble is," laments Hoff Sommers, "that this kind of answer, which is so common as to be typical, is no better than the moral philosophy of a sociopath."Today's kids have been deceived by aggressive advocacy of bad philosophical values - the sort that are big on "rights," and "self-esteem," very light on things like responsibility, respect, duty, honour, self-control, self-sacrifice and other quaint qualities that used to be revered as unquestioned virtues in our society.

Moral naivete

This increasing moral naivete combines catastrophically with a popular culture of violent, sex-saturated entertainment, dysfunctional family life, abdication of parental authority; social science quackery in the educational system and in the social work and judicial arenas; an aggressive consumer/materialist ethos; and the pervasiveness of drugs, booze, violent entertainment, and promiscuous sex in youth culture.

Under these circumstances, it's no mystery why some kids turn predatory. Until the parenting problem is addressed, there is no hope of turning the tide of youthful anarchy, anomie and alienation.

At least the new survey reveals that public perception is finally clueing in to the actual causes and nature of the distemper. Getting people to implement the remedy will be another matter.

cwmoore@gmx.net

Charles W. Moore is a Nova Scotian freelance writer and editor whose articles, features, and commentaries have appeared in more than 40 magazines and newspapers in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and Australia.

Labels: Canada, morality, parents, relativism, self-control, violence