Last week, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote a column on an academic study concerning the nearly complete lack of a moral vocabulary among most American young people. Here are excerpts from Brooks’s summary of the study of Americans aged 18 to 23. It was led by “the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith”:
● “Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.”
● “When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all.”
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● “Moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner.”
● “The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste.”
● “As one put it, ‘I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.’”
● “Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.” (Emphases mine.)
Ever since I attended college I have been convinced that “studies” either confirm what common sense suggests or they are mistaken. I realized this when I was presented study after study showing that boys and girls were not inherently different from one another, and they acted differently only because of sexist upbringings.
This latest study cited by David Brooks confirms what conservatives have known for a generation: Moral standards have been replaced by feelings. Of course, those on the left only believe this when an “eminent sociologist” is cited by a writer at a major liberal newspaper.
What is disconcerting about Brooks’s piece is that nowhere in what is an important column does he mention the reason for this disturbing trend: namely, secularism.
The intellectual class and the Left still believe that secularism is an unalloyed blessing. They are wrong. Secularism is good for government. But it is terrible for society (though still preferable to bad religion) and for the individual.
One key reason is what secularism does to moral standards. If moral standards are not rooted in God, they do not objectively exist. Good and evil are no more real than “yummy” and “yucky.” They are simply a matter of personal preference. One of the foremost liberal philosophers, Richard Rorty, an atheist, acknowledged that for the secular liberal, “There is no answer to the question, ‘Why not be cruel?’”
With the death of Judeo-Christian God-based standards, people have simply substituted feelings for those standards. Millions of American young people have been raised by parents and schools with “How do you feel about it?” as the only guide to what they ought to do. The heart has replaced God and the Bible as a moral guide. And now, as Brooks points out, we see the results. A vast number of American young people do not even ask whether an action is right or wrong. The question would strike them as foreign. Why? Because the question suggests that there is a right and wrong outside of themselves. And just as there is no God higher than them, there is no morality higher than them, either.
Forty years ago, I began writing and lecturing about this problem. It was then that I began asking students if they would save their dog or a stranger first if both were drowning. The majority always voted against the stranger — because, they explained, they loved their dog and they didn’t love the stranger.
They followed their feelings.
Without God and Judeo-Christian religions, what else is there?
— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.
Back in what I generally think of as my more religious days (Christian, member of Campus Crusade for Christ, etc.) I definitely saw the shallowness of the philosophical thinking of the college-aged. Crusade did a survey in the dorms. It was basically an excuse for going door to door and inviting people to the next Crusade meeting, but I found it illuminating. The student was given four statements to agree or disagree wtih: the first basically asked if they believed in theism (there is a personal god who is involved with the world day to day); the second, whether they believed in deism (there is a personal god who is NOT involved day to day); the third ask about pantheism (god exists, but is not personal); and the last dealt with atheism (there is no god).
It was shocking how many of the respondents answered yes to all four questions. Occasionally, one would realize that some pair of the questions were mutually contradictory, but rarely would anyone see that all four were like that.
Skip forward twenty years to when I am now seeing the next generation of students coming coming to work at BLS, and I am now surprised at the level of moral degradation, and not on issues of sexual behavior, which apart from issues over illegitimacy I care much less about, but over things that I thought were things everyone agreed on, like cheating on take home exams. WIthout testing honesty, especially when the prof grades on a curve, everything becomes a race for the bottom.
Bottom line: you don't have to be the church lady to think that there has been a weakening of morals as Christianity lost its strong majority.
And yet...
Does being a Christian really correlate being living a moral life? Forget the harder burden of proving causality for now, is there even a correlation?
I haven't read it in a while, but Christianity Today used to run articles by a pollster who looked at how different the lives of Christians are from non-Christians, and in terms of divorce (i.e, in terms of what is publicly confirmable, there was zero different. SImilarly, when I was in an Intervarsity bible study in graduate school, we were encourage to apply our faiths to our fields of study and vice-versa, so I went to Econ-lit (the search engine of choice at the time for the economics literature) and started looking for articles related to Christianity. What I found was a similar study to those from Christianity Today (there were several), this time done not based on a survey of individuals but by looking for a correlation between church attendance in conservative denominations by country and things like divorce by county. Again, nothing.
And does this REALLY fly in the face of all of our experiences? I mean, if you split recent history into when Christianity was strong and a now when it isn't, when was it that legalized racism was so strong? When was it that legalized abortion was at its height? Which era has done a more effective job of criminalizing domestic violence? The answer to which was the more moral age seems to significantly depend on which question you ask.
And, really, just how much better a moral guide is the Bible, taken as a whole? One of the things most damaging to my faith was reading the Old Testament and realizing that its claim to being the work of a morally superior being was dubious at best. To take the starkest case, look at God's commandments to Saul to genocide the Amalekites. Some of the Amalekites had, hundreds of years earlier, been involved in a raiding party that hit the end of the column of Israelites going back from Egypt to Israel. The back of the column was where the old and weak tended to drift to, so, no doubt, these raiders were moral scum. So they retaliated and mopped up the Amalekites.
Fine. In fact, good for them. But God also told the Israelites that, one day, after they were back in the promised land, they'd be stronger, and on that day, they should come back for the Amalekites. Sure enough, hundreds of years later, they are stronger, and God tells Saul, now is the time. And his instructions were memorable: kill everyone, down to the child who was born yesterday. How anyone who believes that thinks that they are in a position to tell people like bin Ladin that God would never order them to do something like 911 is beyond me. It seems that the most they can do is say that, as a factual matter, this wasn't one of those times when God wants things like that done.
Remember, I'm not making a causal argument. I'm merely asking if there is much correlation. And if there is no correlation, then I'm asking one more thing: what good is a statistically insignificant God?
You will know the tree by the fruits thereof.
Go ahead. Live in a society untouched by the knowledge of God. You'll be so busy trying to just survive, you won't have time for all your self-indulgent navel-gazing.
Don't take my word for it. Just do it.
Every single thing about you has been formed by over three thousand years of religious culture. However you view God, or the concept thereof: where do you think it all came from? Why were we able to so easily subdue the American Indians, if we, as men, were equal? Physically, we were probably not even as tough, but our society had advanced so far, almost entirely due to the presence of religion. Our religion.
Even if you are completely convinced there is no God, one cannot deny the fruits of His tree. You are also making the same old mistake: you are not to put the Lord, your God, to the test. He is not accountable to you, by definition. He is God. Americans, young ones in particular, don't like this. They are ever looking for a scapegoat, an alibi. The entire point of the Bible is: the problem, whatever it is, by definition, can't be God's fault. Once you get that through your head, you'll realize: maybe it's you.
Of course you think and question. You were given a brain for a reason and you are accountable for how you use it. If all you use it for is to rationalize to avoid feelings of guilt while doing whatever you can get away with ... well, you've dug your ditch willingly but I'd recommend putting down the shovel.
Hmmm... I wasn't aware I was "rationalizing to avoid feelings of guilt while doing whatever I can get away with". I am glad you have more knowledge of what I'm doing than I do!
My point to the OC was that religion is not the be all and the end all when it comes to progress. In fact, religion has often been an impediment to scientific inquiry.
It was this scientific inquiry, even retarded as it was by the Church, along with incessant and very un-Christian-like warfare, that led Europe to the top of the civilizational heap. Religion had very little to do with it.
The problem is that, at least in the Abrahamic religions, the punishment for using your brain for selfish ends is very similar to the punishment for putting it to the nobler attempt to decide the truth and, however accidentally, get it wrong. (That is, honest idol worshippers go the same hell as the honestly wrong heritic.)
Easy enough to answer. Many people who identify as "Christian" don't ~practice~ Christianity anyway. It's just what their parents told them they were and maybe they have a dusty copy of the King James in a closet somewhere. Even among practicing Christians in America the elephant in the room is that Democratic forms of Protestantism (where congregations vote to change moral teachings and hire clergy) panders to the emotionalism of the congregants. Such shifting notions of morality in terms of things like abortion and sexual integrity reveal a foundation of sand.
The old saw about the Old Testament is toothless and senseless. It just goes to show how absolutely backwards it is to presume that God the Father (ineffable Creator) resembles Man (a bigger, more powerful, more righteous human being) rather than the other way around. If these were serious intellectual concerns you should've been confounded at the Great Flood where God wipes out all the inhabitants of the known world save Noah and his family. After all, it's wrong for people to drown other people indiscriminately, isn't it? It is a complete logic fallacy to assume that because something is wrong for a Human to do it is wrong for God to do.
If this distinction is confusing then just stick to Jesus. He's God incarnate in flesh and set clear examples for how God expects Man to behave.
You miss the statistical point here. I realize that being in a garage doesn't MAKE you a car, as we often said in Crusade. But being in a garage should make you MORE LIKELY to be a car, shouldn't it. Look at all objects (things and living creatures) in the world and get the percentage of them that are cars. Now look at all the objects in the world's garages that are cars. I dare say that the second percentage is higher than the first. But whether you look at it person by person or county by country, the percentages of people in churches who divorce is no different that the overall US percentage. This doesn't just say that there are exceptions to the rule, it says that there is no rule to begin with!
And, I guess if you just say that, no matter what God does, it's right, fine. That's your concept of God. He tells you to steal? Go steal. He tells you to sell yourself as a prostitute? Go do see yourself. He tells you to commit genocide? Go commit genocide.
But if God is really someone who punishes person A for something person B (who lived hundreds of years earlier) did, then the really amazing thing about God is how much we, His creation, have outgrown him. Oh, he's got all the guns. He's omnipotent. But He's got the morals of a Nazi. Seriously, if God told someone to restart the gas ovens for the Jews because of something their ancestors did, would you REALLY just tell yourself, "...the judgements of the Lord are true, and righteous altogether..."? I mean, maybe you play along to show to God that, like Abraham, you'll do what he wants. But when it comes time to poor in the gas, what then?
Confusing correlation and causation is a popular logic fallacy among the politicians and media talking heads of our day. If you don't follow the precepts of your religion or you conform them to society the results are obvious.
Meanwhile you continue to insist on a God made in your image, rather than the other way around. That's lamentable.
Where in the Bible, exactly, did you ever get the impression that in ~this~ life the innocent would not suffer for the sinful? Did Jesus suffering and dying on that cross teach you nothing about the nature of man, sin, and a fallen world? Look up in the sky. See the sun? It's going to go Red Giant one day and wipe out every living thing on the Earth. God put it there on purpose. God's obviously an omni-genocidal maniac that hates the human race, right?
The argument with those who take killing "infidels" in school-buses as a commandment of their god is not that it is wrong to kill when God commands it, but rather that God has not commanded it and that the impulse to kill in His name typically originates from our own failings instead. Their religious beliefs aren't relative or equal with others. They are ~wrong~.
YOU: Confusing correlation and causation is a popular logic fallacy among the politicians and media talking heads of our day.
ME: As I said in my original post (twice), I'm not making a causal argument. I'm saying that there is no correlation between claiming to be a Christian and engaging or not engaging in the acts said to be unchristian which can be found recorded in the public records.
YOU: Where in the Bible, exactly, did you ever get the impression that in ~this~ life the innocent would not suffer for the sinful?
ME: The Amalekites weren't wiped out by a tidal wave that we can blame on a fallen world. They were murdered, down to the child born yesterday, by the direct command of God, in repsonse to a raid made by (some) of their ancestors hundreds of years earlier.
YOU: God's obviously an omni-genocidal maniac that hates the human race, right?
ME: There's a difference between not acting to stop a killing and ordering it. Similarly, there's a difference between not halting a process that is due to Fall and ordering the murder of people for a crime they didn't commit.
I personally give Christians a pass on the differences between the New and Old Testaments. For the most part, American Christians are much more in tune with the New Testament. The Old Testament contradicts the New Testament in so many ways it's not even funny, but that's because it was written before the entire concept of Christianity was conceived. All it did was to provide some convenient backstory to the newer, better Testament (Jesus's testament).
Christians will never admit the contradictions between the two Testaments, but that's fine. They always turtle up when they feel their beliefs are under attack. I am fine with debating the New Testament with them, as that's got enough wackiness in it to provide a lifetime of criticism.
Certainly they aren't out there killing Amalekites. But if one is inclined to say that the whole book is the work of a morally perfect author, well, they've chosen the battleground themselves.
"But being in a garage should make you MORE LIKELY to be a car, shouldn't it."
The car is a car and it has no control over its car-ness. It is a car wherever it is.
A person who claims to be living a Christian life but fails to adhere to the tenets of the faith is fooling himself and anyone who believes his assertion.
Even the devil himself can go to church. Even the devil himself can quote scripture.
I once had a person tell me he was a 'Catholic atheist.'
A typical example is Pelosi. She claims to be an observant Catholic but is profoundly pro-abortion. She can not support abortion as the Church states is an absolute evil.
Well, which is she? What she is is hard to say but I can state that she is not a Catholic, her assertions to the contrary not withstanding.
The whole car thing was meant to counter the claim that, just as being in a garage doesn't make you a car, being in church doesn't make you a Christian.
I was trying to say that my critique isn't that, SOME in church act the same as the world. Rather, I was saying that (when it comes to visible things like divorce for which there are good public records) those in the church don't act differently from the population as a whole.
So, unless the ratio of Christian to non-Christian in a (evangelical / fundamentalist) church is the same as in society as a whole, there's a surprising tendency for Christians to not behave differently than non-Christians (as define above).
"... divorce for which there are good public records) those in the church ..."
And our argument was and still is if people who claim they are 'in the Church' but not living according to its teachings then they are by their behavior not 'in the Church.'
If a person is not living according to Christain doctrine then his claim of being a Christian is false. If he not a Christian then his behavior is not an indictment of the Church but only of himself.
You are arguing that people can have it both ways, that they can be a practicing Christian without actually practicing Christianity.
I think you've become confused in your theology. Even Paul says that Christians still sin. My point was to quantify how much they still sin, in one specific area, compared to the general public.
All I was saying was that the churched didn't really act better than society at large, so urging that people become Christians so that morality would increase didn't comport with the facts.
Still, hmastercyclinder brought out some evidence I hadn't seen before, so I'm back to being neutral on the question of Christians and frequency of divorce.
You've got a problem of methodology. Barna and the rest do not control the selection of the poplulation - it selects itself. "Are you a evangelical Christian?" - "Oh, Yes, I am." BS. I know people inside and outside of bible believing churches, a fairly reasonable sample, and there is a huge difference between the two. "Research says" is a very weak reed to lean on.
The problem with the divorce statistics is that it doesn't take cohabitation into account. If someone goes through a series of long-term cohabiting relationships, then that person has had the equivalent of a string of divorces, but because there was no legal marriage, there was no divorce statistic. To really know whether religion influences the divorce rate, requires a second study on Christian vs. secular cohabitation rates.
