Jerry C. Brewer
Ungodliness in the individual is the well-spring of all societal ills and the progenitor of all that is evil among man. Our civilization arose upon the fundamental belief that the rights we enjoy are tempered by responsibilities to family, community and state. It is this sense of “ought”, derived from our religious past, that produces what is orderly, right, and harmonious in American society. Antithetical to our roots, libertarianism, hedonism, anarchism, and humanism, which exalt self above all—including God—are the causes of today’s moral decay and Allan Bloom says degenerate families are responsible for those.
Attending church or synagogue, praying at the table, were a way of life, inseparable from the moral education that was supposed to be the family’s special responsibility in this democracy. Actually, the moral teaching was the religious teaching. There was no abstract doctrine. The things one was supposed to do, the sense that the world supported them and punished disobedience, were all incarnated in the Biblical stories. The loss of the gripping inner life, vouchsafed those who were nurtured by the Bible must be primarily attributed not to our schools or political life, but to the family, which, with all its rights to privacy, has proved unable to maintain any content of its own. The dreariness of the family’s spiritual landscape passes belief. …The delicate fabric of the civilization into which successive generations are woven has unraveled, and children are raised, not educated (The Closing of The American Mind, 1987, Simon & Schuster, NY, pp. 56-57).
A sense of right moral conduct, inherent in the Bible and believed and taught in the homes of the earliest settlers in the North American Colonies, was the guiding philosophy of the nation’s founders. That sense of moral right, upon which the endurance and stability of any nation depends, has been lost in America because the home has failed.
Prodded by religious skepticism and the anti-biblical religion of Secular Humanism, we have loosed from the mooring of absolute moral right and set ourselves adrift upon the dark and uncertain sea of human reason. Abandoning their God-ordained responsibilities as society’s basic institutions, the home and the state have formed an unholy alliance and created a generation that perpetuates a morally deviant and bankrupt society.
The only way this can be rectified is for the home to once again assume its God-ordained place as the primary nurturer and the foundation upon which all other society stands. The state has destroyed its own moral foundation by lifting familial, benevolent and religious obligations from the family and appropriating those to itself under the Human Secularist guise of “social legislation.”
The state cannot replace the family any more than the superstructure of a building can replace its foundation. The ills of society will be rectified only if (and when) fathers and mothers once again assume their responsibilities before God and bring their children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (Eph. 6:4). But this will involve reclaiming their children from a paternalistic government which dangles the god of Secular Humanism before their eyes, and promises them freedom while shackling them in heathen chains of moral depravity.
