A False Culture War Narrative
Too many American Christians, white American Christians to be exact, buy into the false narrative of moral decline in the US. They’ll point to gay marriage, the rise of trans-genderism, the increase in atheists and agnosticism, and the general selfishness of society.
In some ways, for some definitions of ‘sin’, it’s an easy case to make. Society seems to be far less inhibited in its celebration of selfishness, unconstrained sexuality, and mean-spirited-ness. Don’t believe me? Just spend a few minutes on the internet and it will be incredibly hard to avoid.
But in truth, my contention is not that mankind is naturally good-natured... it isn’t. But then again, it has never been. I think what five minutes on the internet proves is not that mankind has become less moral, but that it has always been immoral and that we just live during a time where people are sharing their true selves with a larger community… albeit a digital one. For sure we live in a time where people find it acceptable to behave openly in ways society would have shunned before. But this is more about what was proper behavior in public and not at all, I believe, what people were, or were not doing way back when and what they actually believed.
Yes our current quasi-hedonistic and unabashedly selfish public environment creates more opportunity for this behavior to spread and that can be both a blessing and a curse for certain segments of society. But it doesn’t mean people are more or less moral… they just have more opportunity to broadly share the immorality that already lives inside. There are certainly downsides to this… a lot of them. Selfishness is never a societal good and we’ve arguably never had a greater celebration of it than we now do on the internet and social media. We have in fact normalized a lot of behavior that would have shocked polite society years ago, but again, there are significant upsides to this type of public transparency just as there are significant downsides.
Is it really all bad now? Not really. It’s actually so much better in some ways for so many… really!
We cannot ignore the reality of cruelty and oppression black Americans have faced for hundreds of years in America at the hands of the majority white Americans. The slavery, the brutality, the oppression, the murder without justice, the broken families, the stripping away of their humanity for 400 years, all the while it was their industry and their sacrifice that made America such a land of prosperity. America owes them much more than they have yet received. Nonetheless… our society today, for all of its proliferated selfish ills, is a vastly more moral and just place for African Americans and in fact, any person of color, than it has ever been.
I’m not remotely saying that things are great for minorities. They are not. Not at all. But few would dispute that black Americans have a greater voice, greater opportunity, and a far more normalized place in American society today than they ever have. President Barack Obama has called this notion incontrovertible. This isn’t enough, of course, to balance out the injustices against minorities in America. But it does reflect how life for this persecuted American community is better in 2018 it was in 1918. This is not moral decline. This is the result of a just cause whose proponents struggled and persevered against so many odds and to a limited extent, prevailed. And thank God for it!
It used to be better… for whom?
I believe that we’re no more or less moral than we’ve ever been… we’re just more organized, transparent, and liberated from past societal constraints (for good and for ill).
To illustrate the point about the current state of moral decline, the pastor of my church, a man I greatly admire and respect, recently remarked on the controversy in 1939 about the line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” from the movie Gone With The Wind. He drew a contrast between how shocked society was in 1939 by the open utterance of the word “damn” and how today, we don’t think twice when we hear much more graphic language. His point, which in a two-dimensional way is true, resonated with the congregation.
This, you see, is part of the false narrative that so many choose to believe to be true. Yes, perhaps people were shocked in 1939 but probably not because someone used the word “damn” but in fact because it was in a movie. Lots of people cursed then… openly, in public, and in front of their kids. The new thing was that it was in the movies. This wasn’t a breach of morality but of public decorum.
But the much more salient point is that this represents no compelling contrast of what was sinful years ago versus what is seen as such today. What about the morality of that day? … where groups of white Americans would chase and lynch Black Americans, where Black Americans were treated as a lesser race, denied opportunity, could not even share the same spaces or even water fountains as whites… where women of every race were ignored, looked down upon, routinely taken advantage of, and abused by men with no consequences for the abusers… yet somehow the word “damn” in a movie should be seen as the barometer of a fallen morality?
There’s a much more compelling argument to be made that Americans in 1939 were far less moral. Were they more polite to one another? Perhaps. Were they more concerned with their outward appearance or verbal propriety? You bet. Did they treat their fellow citizens, brothers and sisters of color or different ethnicities with the same degree of respect, kindness, and love? Not remotely! In fact, in general, they were mean spirited, cruel, hateful, and in some cases terrorizing. Not exactly what I’d look to as the zenith of American and Christian morality… actually something closer to its nadir and not something to be exemplified or ‘hearkened back’ to.
While I’m sure that there are folks on both sides of the political aisle who very much believe that the dominant political differences are the result of a culture war, I don’t. Yes, of course, there are aspects within our culture that are adversarial and even downright hostile toward one another. But the balance of our anger, impatience, and hostility toward one another is there because humans have always been this way and until they embrace that they are part of the problem and deliberately work to do right by going against their nature, it will never change. The culture war is actually an inner war, with ourselves that then only later bleeds out into our culture.
Ready to really change the culture? Then let’s examine and change ourselves.
