The Continuous Decline of Morality in the USA

In a recent article about the moral decline of the USA, Michael Bresciani noted that in a recent Gallup survey, the respondents selected poor leadership, inflation, and immigration as the most important problems facing our country.  Sadly, he also noted that at the bottom of the list in terms of significance (9th place) was ethics, morality, and family decline.  Based on Bible priorities, he rightly says, “we can safely conclude that Americans have it backwards, or upside down.”  The decline of the item at the bottom of the Gallup list is the real reason why we are in decline as a country.  In writing this, he echoes and updates the conclusion of the great Puritan minister of the 17th century, John Owen.

Owen wrote,

This hardening [moral decline] is so serious that your heart becomes insensitive to moral influence. … You who at one time were very tender and would melt under the influence of the Word and under trials will grow “sermon-proof” and “trial-proof.”  You who used to have great assurance of God’s love, trembling at His presence, the thought of death, and your appearance before Him, will now have a hardness in your heart that remains unmoved by these things.

We should lament because of how far our country has come from its Christian spiritual foundations in Protestant Christianity and particularly the Puritan mind.  We know that the Puritans came to New England with the intention of founding a blessed biblical “city on a hill.”  Governance was according to biblical principles, with elected magistrates in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.  By 1641, Connecticut passed its first “Code of Liberties,” which was a legal code modeled after the Old Testament laws, albeit not exactly the same.  Biblical morality was the centerpiece of the culture.  In Virginia, where the earliest settlers belonged to the Church of England and not to the Puritans, the church as well as the fort were the first two structures built, and attendance at church was required on a daily basis.

Within less than two centuries, the ideals of settlement as part of the eternal struggle against Satan, sin, and the world gradually became diluted.  Under the influence of the English physician and philosopher John Locke, the oppressions of the British monarchy were deemed unbearable as well as unjust and un-Christian.  However, John Locke’s defense of Christianity in his little-read Reasonableness of Christianity was considered by many colonial Christians as insufficient for its lack of reference to holiness, Bible miracles, the divinity of Christ, and the authority of Divine Providence in everyday affairs.

The heavy taxation the colonists endured, the requirement that they house and feed British troops, the replacement of the Puritan leadership in Massachusetts with a monarchic (Church of England/non-Puritan) governor (Andros), and twenty-plus grievances in the Declaration of Independence were deemed unbearable oppressions.  These grievances were compounded by the fact that the colonies were populated with non–Church of England Christians (e.g., Quakers, Puritans, Baptists) who considered that the non-religious oppressions were motivated by a desire to persecute the colonies’ non–Church of England inhabitants.

Thus, in this writer’s opinion, the War for Independence, though it was justified in part as a blow against colonial oppression, tended to put the emphasis on the connection between political freedom and practical anti-monarchical ideas and to diminish the deep commitment to Christian morality as the focus for day-to-day living.  Of course, many ministers preached in support of the Revolution, but that meant that politics entered the pulpit increasingly as tensions between the crown and the colonies increased.  The U.S. became a type of living political experiment, and a tension between political and economic goals and spiritual goals became a built-in tension in American society.

More