Fault Lines Through our Religion and Our Society!

Most of us sense that there are dangerous divisions developing in our America—even among our churches. Morals and ethics of the society are changing; and those changes are seeping into our religious lives and our basic beliefs. Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever; but…ideas and mores of the society, as a whole are changing.

Our attention has been drawn to these changes by a recent book by Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America. R. R. Reno has also pointed out the same thing in an opening article in First Things for August/September 2013, which he titled War on the Weak.

These writers and others are pointing out to us that there is a developing division among our people between the educated, socially prominent, administratively powerful, and (resultantly) wealthy on the one hand. And…on the other hand are the uneducated, the working class disenfranchised, the socially weak and administratively impotent. The first group is becoming richer while being able to avoid the pitfalls of social deterioration. The second group is falling victim to high-school dropout, single-parent homes, drugs, smoking, crime, and poverty. The first group lives in gated communities; the second group lives in inner-city ghettos and run down housing projects. The first group includes the politicians, university professors, and the media programmers. The second group can hardly find any kind of work.

The second class of people, whom I will call the underclass, used to be able to keep their life in order because of fixed social norms that told them how to behave. Examples: Boys play with toy guns; girls play with dolls. Clean up your plate. Don’t spend more money than you have in the bank. Always tell the truth. Working hard will get you ahead in life. Boys open doors for girls—etc., etc. Those simple rules have given way to relativeness, inclusiveness, diversity, affirmative action, and other varieties of political correctness.

The more fortunate, whom I will call the upper-class, have been able to keep these norms intact for the most part in their social lives; but they have come to espouse liberalized, “progressive,” allowances that disavow the old-fashioned admonitions. Now, so they say, “anything goes;” but…they still teach their own children to avoid these destructive ways of thinking and living. Out-of-wedlock pregnancies are rare in the upper-class; drug use is slight; and dropping out of high school is anathema.

This upper-class of citizens is the one that determines the mores of the society via their control of the media, the universities, and the judiciary. This class has developed an “enhanced morality” that can promulgate a free-living life style for anyone who wants it while, at the same time, preserving a chaste and self-controlled mystique for themselves. This class is the “strong,” as named by Reno.

The underclass, i.e., the “weak,” in the words of Reno, needs social and moral structure in order to avoid chaos in their personal and social lives. But…that structure is missing from our politically correct society. Our dominant culture refuses to meet this need. Indeed, it rejects it root-and-branch, consistently treating clear moral strictures with suspicion, seeing them as dangerous regressions back into Middle Ages morality.

I believe we will never get out of this conundrum until we get back to Christian principles as a society. Only Christ has the answer. Other religions fail to produce the goods that Christ can offer. Islam produces violence. Eastern religions fail the give personal significance, which is the source of human dignity. Atheism and western-style philosophy only lead to nihilism and its complete lack of human fulfillment. Christ is the answer.

Our way out of this morass of cultural relativeness is not better politicians, academics, economists, and other people planners. Our only hope is that our people (and especially our young people) will not retreat into a materialistic, self-seeking, behavior pattern, that idolizes sex and selfishness. We need real cultural and religious leaders who put Christ at the forefront of their life efforts. These kinds of people will never come out of our present “progressive” culture that only sees quick fixes to our social and cultural problems. We must get at the root causes of our social deterioration before any lasting correction can be obtained. The cure can only be found in Christ.

It must be noted that there is a subset of young people in America who come from the upper-class, but who have co-opted the morals and values of the under-class. You can read about these young people in an article in Imprimis about Sex at Harvard and in a book by Christian Smith, Souls in Transition. I wrote a review of this book on 4/10/2012; and if you are interested in this subject, you can access that review in the list of my blog posts.