On looking back upon the idyllic past with rose-colored glasses
Excerpt
I think that the world generally remains as sinful as it always has been, though I do not deny that the tide of morality (and immorality) can ebb and flow, wax and wane. There can be periods of peace and serenity, but there can also be periods of intense evil and unrest. We might look back upon history and think that things were better, there was a greater sense of corporate morality and people had respect for authority. I think we tend to look at the recent past through the lens of television rather than history. We look at the recent past through the lens of TV shows, like, “Leave It to Beaver” instead of history books that record, in all its glory and gore, the best and worst of the past.
There is a reason why back then we had “Leave It to Beaver” and today we have “Desperate Housewives,” etc. The shared moral convictions of our society really did change. They’ve been changing gradually since the Enlightenment and explosively (here) since the 1960s. It’s important not to understate the reality and importance of the culture war.
Our hope, on the other hand, does not lie in somehow building a perfect utopian future—that we can eradicate societies’ ills. Rather, our hope lies in the “better country, that is, a heavenly one,” Zion, which God has prepared for his people (Heb. 11.16).
This is true, if by “our hope” we mean the redemption of the creation and establishing The Kingdom on earth. Not true if we mean a better world for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren. So the post suggests a false choice between aiming for a better society now and trusting in a perfect society Then.
But there’s no incompatibility in the following set of ideas:
- Christian principles were once dominant.
- They aren’t anymore.
- We’re way worse off morally (and maybe even economically) as a result.
- We’d do far better as a society to return to those ideas.
- That “far better” does not equal more genuine conversions to the faith or The Kingdom being established on earth, nor does it reduce the need for the “better country” Christ will establish Himself directly.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Does 2 Tim 3:13 portray decline of society?
“But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived.”
[I’m honestly asking a question]
I think it does. But it has arguably already been fulfilled many times over. Those who take Revelation as prophetic of real events expect something a good bit more dramatic at the end.
Related….
A Tale of Two Kingdoms http://wscal.edu/resource-center/resource/a-tale-of-two-kingdoms
His view is not completely my own, but Horton has some helpful comparisons and contrasts between the Anabaptist attitude and the “two kingdoms” attitude. The view is overly complex on some points but at least explains how we can be citizens of heaven while still taking seriously the work of improving life on earth.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
I don’t need to be persuaded about this: “be citizens of heaven while still taking seriously the work of improving life on earth.”
In my view technology has tremendously increased (not much to debate about that)
while in general the quality of life has not
My inlaws (now gone … both born in the 1910’s) lived in a house with no indoor toilet or indoor running water. I mean outdoor outhouse and pump well. My wife was born at this house in the early ’50s. (farm location: Mattoon Wisconsin)
Ma (as I called her) baked her own bread, bottled her own wine, grew her own vegetables, milked the cows, canned, etc. The happiness factor (or joy of living) was as good as any have today
“The shared moral convictions of our society really did change. They’ve been changing gradually since the Enlightenment and explosively (here) since the 1960s. It’s important not to understate the reality and importance of the culture war.”
Funny that you talk about the 1960s. Because in the 1860s, a significant portion of our population was given over to either brutally enslaving people, or killing Native Americans and taking their land. And the people who vocally opposed such practices were for the most part not the ones that would be considered fundamentalists or conservative evangelicals today, but were rather theological liberals … Unitarians, Quakers and such. So declaring that “Christian principles were once dominant” requires defining such principles after a very limited fashion that falls very short of some very basic things that the Bible actually says.
There is a reason why back then we had “Leave It to Beaver” and today we have “Desperate Housewives,” etc.? Sure. But there is also a reason why Jim Crow was legal and the Ku Klux Klan was more popular than the Republican Party in many parts of the country also. Sure, abortion was illegal, homosexuality was not publicly accepted, and illegitimacy and divorce rates were low, and there were far fewer people relying on public assistance, but there is a lot more to legitimate Christian principles than that.
Solo Christo, Soli Deo Gloria, Sola Fide, Sola Gratia, Sola Scriptura http://healtheland.wordpress.com
This discussion reminded me of this article by Michael Medved concerning American Teens:
Why do so many otherwise reasonable people feel an odd compulsion to embrace the illogical and unsupportable notion of the nation’s total moral collapse?Not sure how all this could be true with metal detectors required in schools, the pushing of alternate forms of marriage, the banning of God from our society, etc., but Medved usually knows what he is talking about.Despite irrefutable evidence of dramatically declining rates of crime, divorce, drug abuse, traffic accidents, smoking, abortion and even environmental pollution in the last twenty years, most Americans insist that the ethical state of the nation has never been worse. Doomsayers love to repeat the portentous line: “If God doesn’t punish America sometime soon, He’s going to have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.”
In fact, no chapter in my current bestseller THE 10 BIG LIES ABOUT AMERICA has inspired more controversy and indignation than the final one, in which I argue against the claim that “America is in the Midst of an Irreversible Moral Decline.”
MS -------------------------------- Luke 17:10
[JobK] Funny that you talk about the 1960s. Because in the 1860s, a significant portion of our population was given over to either brutally enslaving people, or killing Native Americans and taking their land. And the people who vocally opposed such practices were for the most part not the ones that would be considered fundamentalists or conservative evangelicals today, but were rather theological liberals … Unitarians, Quakers and such. So declaring that “Christian principles were once dominant” requires defining such principles after a very limited fashion that falls very short of some very basic things that the Bible actually says.
The influence of Christian principles has always been a matter of degree, and never 100%. So yes, some glaring exceptions are easy to find. But Christian principles ended slavery. Although those who favored slavery were often Christians, their efforts to back the practice with principle were always frauds.
The glaring inconsistencies of the past don’t alter the fact that at one time nearly every American believed several things:
- God exists and created the world
- God is the moral authority over the world
- Everybody will stand before God some day and answer for how he lived
- The Bible communicates right and wrong to us
- The role of government is to protect the security and property of its citizens
- The role of government is not to secure an artificial equality of outcomes on its citizens
Along with these, a solid majority believed for a long time that fornication and adultery are serious sins, that marriage should be for life, that certain kinds of language constitute bad manners and are not suitable for ears of children and ladies, that men should lead in their homes as the primary providers and protectors, that wives should be the primary care providers for children, that reputable women should not be seen in public with 2/3 of their skin exposed… and much, much more.
There is no longer any strong consensus on any of these things.
Do some overstate the quality of the good old days? Sure. But to claim that there is no meaningful difference between now and earlier times is simply inaccurate. The sexual revolution was not the only revolution in the 60s, but it’s called a “revolution” for good reason.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Funny that you talk about the 1960s. Because in the 1860s, a significant portion of our population was given over to either brutally enslaving people, or killing Native Americans and taking their land. And the people who vocally opposed such practices were for the most part not the ones that would be considered fundamentalists or conservative evangelicals today, but were rather theological liberals … Unitarians, Quakers and such. So declaring that “Christian principles were once dominant” requires defining such principles after a very limited fashion that falls very short of some very basic things that the Bible actually says.
Though it had its defenders, conservative, orthodox Christians certainly had a large role to play in opposing slavery. One example: I actually own a copy of the lightweight Book of Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church published in 1860 which every circuit-riding preacher carried in his saddlebags along with his Bible. It reads…
Ques. What shall be done for the extirpation of the evil of slavery?
Answ. We declare that we are as much as ever convinced of the great evil of Slavery. We believe that the buying, selling, or holding of human beings, to be used as chattels, is contrary to the laws of God and nature, and inconsistent with the Golden Rule in our Discipline which requires all who desire to continue among us to “do no harm,” and to “avoid evil of every kind.” We therefore affectionately admonish all our Preachers and People to keep themselves pure from this great evil, and to seek its extirpation by all lawful and Christian means.
But you are right, brother, that every age has its sins. Few nations struggle in a death grip to end them, as America did.
Speaking more broadly, when Christian principles are dominant in a culture, sins tend to show up as pharisaical judgmentalism and moralism, but that moralism actually strengthens a society because God’s rules are respected and honored. It may not be saving in terms of more people possessing eternal life, but there is more honesty, fidelity, volunteerism, and self-control. (I certainly remember a time when no one locked their doors at night, adults were respected, and it was shameful to get pregnant out-of-wedlock. And how many young people today would even care to do as many underage soldiers did in 1861 and even 1941…put the number 18 in their shoe so they could “honestly” say, “I’m over 18, sir.”) Modern sins, having thrown off all respect for such rules, tend to societal decay. It is all around us. The out of wedlock birthrates alone are staggeringly high.
“God exists and created the world
God is the moral authority over the world
Everybody will stand before God some day and answer for how he lived
The Bible communicates right and wrong to us
The role of government is to protect the security and property of its citizens
The role of government is not to secure an artificial equality of outcomes on its citizens”
There is more to Christian principles than that. A lot more. Evidence of this is the fact that those principles could just as easily be Jewish principles, Roman Catholic principles, Mormon principles, Jehovah’s Witness principles, oneness Pentecostal principles, freemason principles, Muslim principles, or mainline liberal Protestant principles as Christian ones. Are we forgetting that Barack Obama professes belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who died on the cross for sins and was resurrected on the third day? Those are things that Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and a number of our other founding fathers specifically rejected, along with their failure to make any reference to God, even a vague one to some general idea of a deistic deity, in our (very humanistic and Enlightenment-driven) Constitution.
As for your paragraph that began with “Along with these”, first off let me restate that I never said that things weren’t getting worse. Quite the contrary, my reading of the Bible, which I admit is heavily influenced by premillennial dispensationalism (though I am no longer officially in that camp) predicts that things will get worse. But I am just saying that there is a lot more to legitimate Christian principles than a few selected cultural markers like sexual morality, public decency and welfare dependency. I go back to the Native Americans … the reason why fewer than 5% of them identify with any form of Christianity has a whole lot to do with our treatment of them when this nation did a much better job of adhering to some Christian principles, but a lot worse job of adhering to others.
Solo Christo, Soli Deo Gloria, Sola Fide, Sola Gratia, Sola Scriptura http://healtheland.wordpress.com
I agree with JobK. There are numerous ways that things are better today in the U.S. than a hundred or two hundred years ago. Sanctity of life would be one of them.
Enjoyed these thoughts!
Straight Ahead!
jt
Dr. Joel Tetreau serves as Senior Pastor, Southeast Valley Bible Church (sevbc.org); Regional Coordinator for IBL West (iblministry.com), Board Member & friend for several different ministries;
There is more to Christian principles than that. A lot more.
This is not in dispute. The article in the OP seems to take the position that things are not better than they were… that earlier days simply had different sins but just as bad and just as many. The title identifies moral progress and decline as a myth. This is what I’m disputing.
Moral decline is reality. And on the whole things were better morally before the 60s.
So my view is that there was once a consensus in Western society in which Christian ideas (yes, these overlap with Romanist, Jewish, and Mormon ideas to a large extent) were dominant. The ideas that most greatly influence a society are the ones I have in mind—the ones that have to do with the perennial Big Questions of where we came from, why we are here, how right and wrong are determined, what is the nature of a human being and the slightly smaller but still huge question, what is government for.
GregH…
It’s hard to see how sanctity of life is better respected in the US today than it was 200 years ago. Two hundred years ago nobody thought killing an unborn baby was OK for any reason, even though some did it. And nearly everyone thought life mattered enough that a murderer ought to be promptly executed.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Sanctity of human life is about more than unborn children. I could cite numerous examples of how violence and murder was tolerated in this country in the past in ways we cannot imagine. For example, how about the cold-blooded murder of workers when they began to unionize? How about slavery and the murder that went on? How about the Salem Witch Trials where people were murdered with no justification? How about the fact that labor conditions in the coal mines were knowingly not safe and workers were treated like disposable cattle? How about the vigilantes that took the law into their own hands in rural areas? And on top of that of course, abortion still happened as well.
No, today’s society is far less violent and values human life much more. We watch violence in movies; two hundred years ago, people lived it.
I don’t think you can identify the Salem Witch Trials as a sanctity of life issue. Same with the vigilantes, who often operated as the earliest form of law in region. These were not instances of life being cheap as some of the other situations you cite. Even then, I don’t think any of your citations come close to the 3,700 daily U. S. abortions - for instance there were approx 12,000 coal mining deaths between 1911 and 1915; terrible, but hardly on a par with the 1.37 million abortions in the U. S. in 1996 alone.
Why is it that my voice always seems to be loudest when I am saying the dumbest things?
I am not referring to raw numbers—that is the wrong way to compare attitudes about sanctity of life for any number of reason. The real issue is the attitude toward human life.
There is no way that our society today would allow the Salem government to put innocent people to death in the way it did.
If 12,000 coal miners died within 5 years in this century, there would be massive repercussions and mine owners would be in jail.
Nor would our society for one second allow vigilante justice. Note what happened with Trayvon Martin. You would not have to go back many decades and few would have blinked an eye at what happened there.
Nor would we value a African American as 3/5ths of a person and treat him like an animal.
And while we all probably disdain the Chicago teachers union at the moment, our society would not accept an orchestrated effort to murder union workers like you might have seen in our past.
And by the way, homicide rates have been on the decline since colonial times though we have the same murder rate today that we had in the 1960’s. http://thepublicintellectual.org/2011/05/02/a-crime-puzzle/
This is not really a debatable issue unless you throw abortion into the mix. There is no question at all that the US population values life today more than it did 200 years ago.
Discussion