Is America Truly in a State of Moral Decline?

William Pfaff, Truthdig.org

In his January 2009 column on Truthdig.com, William Pfaff parrots the conservative argument that America has been in a state of progressive moral decline since the 1960s. The argument is based on the subjective viewpoint that an increasingly liberal society equates to a culture that is becoming morally depraved. But let's take a look at the facts about the state of American culture relative to the guarantees of freedoms and rights outlined in our Constitution before we rush to judgement that America is going in moral reverse rather than improving as a nation.

First, let's deal with the contention that the "events of the 60s" somehow contributed to the dissolution of moral authority in America. The 1960s and early 1970s were defined by a series of public protests over a issues that boiled down to basic human rights. Protests over race relations, the Vietnam war, abortion rights, sexual freedom, gender & orientation equity and free speech illuminated the fact that the so-called "traditional hierarchies and general moral consensus" could be quite wrong about significant issues of human rights.

Racism

The fight against racism alone would have been a significant moral victory if that is all that came from the 60s social revolutions. African-Americans had grown tired of being told they were equal citizens in an America that treated them worse than second-class citizens. A racial revolution led by civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. bravely fought to gain increased social respect and public access for people of color nationwide. That is clearly an example of moral progress, not moral decline. Liberals and conservatives sided together to support this move toward positive social change.

Vietnam (and other) Wars

By the late 1960s the Vietnam War had turned into a murder mill, chewing up thousands of young American and Vietnamese lives. America's motivations for entering the war became foggy as an unclear long term strategy took over its operations. Smart young minds ascertained that public protest against an increasingly immoral war was the right thing to do. Thus freedom of speech and the right to dissent produced an end to the war. Ugly as the protests might have seemed at the time, those instincts represent true patriotism on the part of Americans in calling out the moral confusion of the Vietnam War. That is social progress, not cultural regression, a fact pointed out by contemporary liberal dissent toward the invasion of Iraq, a war apparently begun on false pretense.

Women's Rights

The battle over women's rights took many forms as feminism fought against cultural expectations imposed upon women by those "traditional hierarchies" mentioned by William Pfaff. Repression of women's rights included a patriarchal social structure that denied women the right to equal work and equal pay. It also traditionally relegated women to a subservient role in marital and social relationships and denied women the rights to manage their own reproductive health.

Abortion

The resultant expression of women's rights was the judgment passed in the court case Roe vs. Wade guaranteeing a right to privacy in electing to have an abortion. That judgment came to represent the right to have an abortion at all. Opponents of abortion argue this judgement is tantamount to approving murder of the unborn, but the reproductive rights of a woman must be protected by law just as the rights to privacy in many other areas of American life are protected by law.

What secretly seems to burn in the souls of abortion opponents is their apparent ineffectiveness in preventing more women from having abortions. Put simply, they have failed fairly miserably in the moral quest to change hearts and minds. Why is that? The obvious answer is that the primary alternatives they propose, abstinence and adoption, are disconnected from the social circumstance and sexual acts leading to unwanted pregnancy. Abortion opponents first want to pretend that sex does not exist (abstinence) or else pretend it never happened (adoption). This is bad social policy compounded by the fact that attacks on the abortion system mean little if they refuse to legitimize practical alternatives for women's reproductive health, including sexual education and birth control. The words of abortion opponents and moral absolutists therefore ring hollow, and women know it.

Morality has not declined in America so much as it has relied too heavily on moral absolutes that divorce it from real solutions. To protect the reproductive rights of women in America, abortion should be safe, legal and rare. The first two parts are being covered by the medical community and Roe vs. Wade. The last component, making abortions rare, is basically being halted by an anti-abortion movement that is downright hypocritical in its denial of real solutions.

If we genuinely want to move toward "lending legitimacy to the institutions of society" that William Pfaff so casually advocates, then we need to offer more than hand-slapping non-solutions like abstinence to cure a problem that has persisted since human history began.

Sexual Freedom

It was no coincidence that an increasingly liberalized society turned to sexual freedom as an expression of individual rights. The repressive attitudes the conservative America of the 1950s developed toward sex took a direct hit beginning late in the decade with introduction of publications like Playboy that brought sexuality to the forefront.

As might be expected with any major shift in cultural norms, there were many social experiments that did not work. But none of them were really new under the sun. Open marriages, for example, were simply Americanized versions of the sexual dalliances first chronicled in the Bible and perpetuated through every regime from Rome to medieval times to Prince Charles, Lady Diana and Camilla. But what about the supposed depravity of today's internet, pornography and televised lust? A simple glance at the book of Ezekiel tells us that sexual appetites have not really changed in 2000 years."There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses."

When it comes to sex, America is no better or worse about it than any previous culture in history. One could even argue that the sexual revolution actually resulted in sexual equity for women, whose sexual needs up to that point in history had been largely kept secret if not totally ignored. It really is a sign of progress, not moral decline, that sexual health in women has been celebrated and honored in society.

As for Playboy, the media company that helped kick off the sexual revolution got caught in a somewhat ironic rip tide of more honest, accessible imagery threatening to wash its airbrushed photos of glamorized women back out in the sea of media from whence it came. The original revolutionaries turned into the ultimate anachronism. In that regard Playboy and religion have more in common than one might think.

Gay rights

The days of forcefully closeting homosexual and transgender individuals are essentially if not officially over. The social forces that forced gays into the closet are breaking down because they are unjust when it comes to individual and relational rights in a free society. Understand that the "moral authority" about which William Pfaff seems sentimental was actually a cruel and unusual punishment supported by a presiding religious prejudice against people whose sexual orientation is biologically fixed toward the same sex. The ridiculous claims by religious and social conservatives that confirmed gays can be "converted" to straight, heterosexual orientations have been proven false. Even the religious foundations for resistance to gay rights are being questioned as greater understanding of scriptural context is examined. Authors like William Pfaff may consider gay rights to be a sign of moral decline in America, but it is only because they have been the beneficiaries of social policies that promote and support their own sexual orientation It is a sign of social progress, not moral decline, that gay citizens in America are now working toward full access to employment and civil rights. Like other targets for discrimination in America, gays still face considerable resistance in the culture, but echoes of the social revolution of the 60s continue to resound in the approval of real civil rights for gays.

Significantly deeper examinations of scripture are also revealing to enlightened Christians that society has nothing to fear from gays, and that the Bible itself could be as wrong about persecuting gays as it was about tolerating slavery.

Evolution

it seems fitting to conclude with an examination of how liberalized education policies that started in the 1960s still face resistance on moral grounds including the "traditional hierarchies and general moral consensus" of conservative resistance to the teaching of evolution. It seems ironic that teaching of well-demonstrated scientific principles remains so controversial today. Opponents of evolution have even been known to blame all sorts of social ills on a theory from science that says basically says all human beings share common origins with the rest of the living species on earth. This simple principle is too much for the arrogant, selfish minds of religious fundamentalists and biblical creationists to accept, however. They prefer to think of themselves as superior to the rest of the world, and hence we see the root belief driving the idea that a "moral decline" has somehow transpired in modern culture. Really it is just that the lie about human superiority has been permanently exposed and the comfort that went with it has been rent asunder.

The simple, populistic notion of common biological origins morally offends those who claim they were created by a god who considers them special and coincidentally wants to keep America safe from animalistic tendencies. These supposed arbiters of what is moral have not wanted, nor do they ever want, true and real equality to be the presiding moral authority in America. That is why prejudice against African-Americans still persists. It is why religious authority is still used to impose rights restrictions on women in society and within marriage. Fear of equality and the responsibility real equity in American culture has driven fears of communism, which preaches equality but wrongly suggests it should be imposed as a rule, not choice in political structure.

Evolution has been blamed for the collapse of religion as an effective, governing social force in modern culture. All that evolution has done is expose the patent flaws in religion by bringing rationality to the forefront of human enterprise.

But we don't need evolution to prove that Christian conservatives are dead wrong about literal interpretation of the Bible and the moral absolutes that stem from it.. Scripture clearly and repeatedly shows Jesus chastising the priests of his day for taking God's word literally and turning it into law. Mark 7 shows Jesus chastising a sect of religious priests known as the Pharisees for their narrow-minded translations of the Word of God. "Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites," we find Jesus saying. "These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men. You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men." Jesus was legitimately worried that people were taking the word of God too literally because it meant they were missing the real point of his teachings. The priests he chastised used a literal interpretation of scripture to dictate the conduct and faith of others. It was a common problem back then and remains a problem today that religious leaders focus too heavily on the law and letter of God and lost sight of the meaning behind the words.

There is no moral decline in America unless you look at the manner in which the people who typically control the authority of religion and the manner in which scripture and moral wisdom is interpreted and applied. There we find the misdirection of moral absolutes. There we find the mistakes about which Jesus warned us. It is not liberal society that is causing moral decline in America. It is the close-mindedness of the very people who claim to protect moral authority that is a drag on the process by which culture typically progresses, including support for science, rational truth and social equality. We need more social revolution, not less to produce a truly moral, equitable nation. Certainly even Jesus was aware that those who cast the most strident blame are often controllers of the game. They are also almost always wrong about true, honest morality. I'll take the former over the latter any day.