A Moral Crisis

America is caught in the grips of a deepening spiritual and moral crisis — a breakdown of epic proportions.

Slowly, insidiously, during the past 50 years, our spiritual and moral foundations have been pulled out from under our cultural feet, and we are left floundering. In almost every area of life, we are experiencing an unraveling of what once held us together and made us invincible. The evidence is all around us — in our churches, our businesses, our families, our government, the state of our freedoms, the state of our marriages — and the devastation goes right down to the core of our societal structure.

There has been no lack of commentary on our modern spiritual plight. We are much like the man who was surrounded by water and yet perished from thirst. Walk through the religion section of any bookstore, and you will find yourself bombarded by the number of titles promising some sort of spiritual fulfillment. Yet the real answer to what ails us is not as easy to comprehend. The assumption is, curiously enough, that doubt, anxiety, moral relativism and disillusionment are the price for progress in our chaotic world.

And, in fact, the last ten years have been a chain of unrest and pandemonium that has undermined our moral and spiritual foundations. Chaos has become the dominant theme of everyday life. While charges of FBI misconduct surrounding the 86 lives lost at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco were still being debated, 168 people were blown to bits in the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Domestic terrorism had become a reality. While Bill Clinton’s fate was being decided, our children were being gunned down in the schools, most notably at Columbine High School in 1999. And while terrorists targeted national landmarks, those hostile to religion continued to target public references to God and religion in the Pledge of Allegiance and Ten Commandments displays.

More recently, Martha Stewart, the mother of do-it-yourself decorating and “good living,” was indicted on charges of securities fraud. And well-known conservative Bill Bennett, author of the best-selling The Book of Virtues and head of an organization opposed to vices such as gambling, made headlines as being a pathological gambler. Their struggles mirror the double life that many public figures supposedly lead in their attempts to navigate the murky waters of a society steeped in relativism.

No wonder people feel the need to escape the mind-numbing day-to-day reality that is modern America. Or that the general populace seeks virtually all forms of distraction to keep from thinking about the real state of our nation.

From an endless array of sports spectacles and bizarre entertainment extravaganzas to the predominantly mindless chatter found on so-called television news talk shows and the national obsession with so-called reality shows like American Idol, where celebrities are made overnight, we have become consumed by a round-the-clock media frenzy.

Escape from this mass-produced, commercial culture has resulted in a strange exodus toward feel-good mysticism, easily found in many modern-day cults, the occult and Eastern religion. This mysticism — also known as pseudo-spirituality — can be seen everywhere from video games to movies, most recently in The Matrix Reloaded, a film hailed by many as a religious experience.

At the same time, the Judeo-Christian system of belief, once the ultimate blueprint for morality, has seemingly lost much of its influence and relevance. The continuing scandals in the church and the church’s lack of intellectualism have failed to offer any soluble answers to the crisis. And the increasing alliance between religion and politics has rendered the church powerless in its ability to hold our leaders accountable. As a result, morality has been laid to waste, rendered insignificant.

Many who are troubled by today’s world nostalgically look back to a historical era when life was supposedly simple and religious values reigned supreme. But as theologian Francis Schaeffer cautioned, “There is no golden age in the past which we can idealize-whether in America, the Reformation, or the early church. But until recent decades something did exist which can rightly be called a Christian consensus or ethos which gave distinctive shape to Western society and to the United States in a definite way.”

However, that consensus is now gone, and retreat to illusions can only create further disillusionment. Americans, in particular, must realize that the tides of change have so altered society that a return to the political, social and moral climate of the past is impossible, if not downright dangerous.

Life, however, has its own way of providing a reality check for our human fantasies. When hijacked planes brought down the World Trade Towers and chipped off a section of the Pentagon, in the process killing thousands, it seemed that the earth moved beneath us and many Americans heralded a turning back to God. But our shallow efforts at clinging to God soon subsided into the bureaucratic motions of unquestioning loyalty to government and flag waving.

In the midst of our soul-searching and national angst, the courts were quick to remind us that too much God is not a good thing and, in fact, is illegal. Nine months after 9/11, a federal appeals court in San Francisco, at the urging of an atheist defendant, ruled that the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance were unconstitutional. Building off the momentum of this case, a federal court of appeals recently ruled that the dinner prayer for prospective Army officers at the Virginia Military Institute is illegal as well. It seems that the old foundations that once gave us spiritual sustenance are not only aggravating to some but are being eliminated altogether. We are, in a sense, in the process of a spiritual and moral lobotomy.

Despite the fact that the older cultural and moral bulwarks of modern society have disintegrated, one thing is certain. We need something beyond so-called “Republican values” to sustain any semblance of order, form and freedom. Serious believers, agnostics and atheists, in the words of author and avowed atheist Michael Harrington, must consider that they “now have the same enemy: the humdrum nihilism of everyday life in much of Western society.”

As we face a tightening down on our freedoms and the call for security and order become shriller, we, unlike prior generations, may not possess the moral resolve to protect what we have cherished for so long. For example, we may not have the fortitude to resist the call for an authoritarian state or, in the extreme, a foreign invasion. I would hope otherwise. In order for that hope to be realized, there must be a national willingness to turn off the television set, step away from the so-called reality programming and become actively involved in changing our “real” world for the better.

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Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Grasping for the Wind . He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.