Is America in Decline?

I think, you'll be glad to know, this series is at an end. Previous posts include:

• Did Constantine and Theodosius make Rome Christian?
• When did Europe become Christian?
• Theories of Western decline
• A more dialectical view
• Wesley, Arminius, and the Enlightenment
• Judeo-Christian Values of America
• The Christian Foundations of America
• Exceptional America

1. In the previous post I suggested that what was initially exceptional about the US is that it was the first fully implemented representational democracy, whose structure had the potential to embody best for the first time in history:

• the love of God toward all the people of a nation equally...
• God's manner of giving individuals the freedom to accept or reject him while...
• protecting all individuals against harm while...
• considering all the individuals of a society equal in value...
• and protecting the minority against the potential oppression of the majority.

A representational democracy is not biblical by structure--such things just didn't exist in the ancient world, and the brief democratic experiment in Greece had no protection for individual rights. It is rather that the results of this structure had the potential to result in a place that embodied Christian values better than any other structure in history.

And of course the US was only the first. There are now representational democracies all over the world.

2. Again, another claim of this series is that the percentage of true Christians at any one time or place is much smaller than those who are Christians in name. I wouldn't be surprised if, in the initial migrations of Europeans to America, there was a higher percentage of fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ. After all, so many of the first immigrants were fleeing religious persecution.

But by the time of the Revolutionary War and the founding of the US, I wonder if the percentage had leveled out to about what it is now--about 20%.

Similarly, although the structure of America's representational democracy seems ideal, its ideals are still being worked out:

• Slavery persisted till 1865 (interestingly, Thomas Jefferson's originally proposed Declaration condemned the slave trade, but the Continental Congress rejected those parts of his version). 
• Reconstruction after the Civil War was so botched that we had to have the Civil Rights movement of the 60s. Race conflict even this past year illustrates that the structures of society are still out of whack in some way.
• Women were not included in America's social contract until 1920 when women had the right to vote. Even in the 1950s their presence in the work place was resisted.

3. There is a sense in which America's laws are more loving than ever. I imagine the wild west to have been a place of vast injustice, where there was scarcely any true rule of law. Imagine how murderers, pedophiles, and wife beaters must have thrived on the old frontier in Kentucky and Indiana in the year 1800.

Spousal and child abuse is less tolerated than ever. Without altering my position on homosexual sex, I still can't imagine that a country where homosexuals are not forced to undergo chemical castration, imprisonment, or death is a more Christian place than one where they are.

4. So in what respects, then, might America be in decline, if the percentage of true Christians remains about the same and the value of all individuals is higher than ever? Even abortion is at its lowest in over forty years.

I suppose there are two parts to this question in my mind: 1) Is the average individual less "moral" than before? A person can behave morally because it is cultural without any real investment in morality or Christ. 2) Is the structure of the US less loving than before?

5. With regard to the first question, the crime rate has fluctuated a little in the last couple of years, but in general is still lower than the 1970s. It thoroughly declined in the 1990s. It was down in 2013.

Divorce rates shot up forty years ago when it became a serious option but are not clearly on the rise now. Despite often quoted statistics about Christian divorce, those statistics relate to all declared Christians and thus include the nominals who are now becoming nones. The divorce rates among the more serious 20% are not as high.

From what I believe is a more thoroughly Christian viewpoint, we must reckon that while divorce is never the ideal, it is not always better for the children for couples to stay together. In cases of abuse, staying together imprints a son or daughter to become an abuser. I also wonder if divorce rates will actually go down in the emerging context where most gay individuals will no longer marry to hide their sexuality ("bearding").

Clearly options like living together and premarital sex are more prevalent than ever. This is deeply saddening. Nevertheless, teenage pregnancy is actually on the decline overall. I don't have any statistics, but I actually doubt that homosexuality is on the rise, although experimentation may be. My hunch is, though, that the percentage of gay individuals is more or less the same as it always has been. We just didn't notice.

So the facts seem to suggest that, at least in these areas, individual morality is not really on the decline among nominals and non-believers.

6. That leads me to the structures, are the structures of America in decline? Here are the things that are worrying me the most:

a. economic disparity
The difference between the wealthy and the everyday person is starker than ever. This strikes at the foundations of a democracy. Capitalism, again, is not an end in itself. The genius of the American system is not that it rewards a few. The most Christian aspect of the American system is the fact that it values all and potentially empowers all.

When the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum has healthy sources of livelihood and healthy living conditions, society as a whole benefits, is healthier, and more embodies the core values of a nation that is truly Christian in values. When the lower end lacks resources, crime increases, violence increases, and history is also replete with tales of revolution. If you don't account for your poor, they will eventually account for you.

b. the welfare class
Although well intentioned--even intentioned with Christian values--too much of America depends for its livelihood on others who do the work. It's not just about unfairness to those who actually do the work. That's the legalistic way to think of it. It's ultimately bad for those on the receiving end and it undermines the capacity of the society as a whole.

Again, I don't have statistics, but one wonders if a sense of entitlement and a laziness with regard to work has become part of all layers of society. The child of a rich or middle class person can be unproductive and non-contributing to society as well. The welfare just comes from within the family rather than from the government. Has America as a whole become less work brittle? I don't know.

This does get at a moral question? Are Americans more oriented to self-gratification and pleasure than ever? I don't know. It might be that, as with the issues I mentioned in the last section, it only feels that way and that the percentages are more or less the same as always.

But when you think of what signifies the decline of a great people, a decline in the impulse to do, to create, to work has to be a major element. If a people are not competing, if they are not ready to defend themselves, if they only receive or take in for themselves as individuals rather than contributing to a greater good, that is an eventual death warrant for a society, it seems to me.

c. lack of education
Education is a crucial element in a successful democracy. An uneducated majority will vote for the wrong people and the wrong outcomes. Here again, while it feels to me like America is less educated than ever, it may very well be that social media and cable news has only given a greater microphone to a certain set of people. This is an insight that I am slowly coming to, the most vocal and alarming voices are often not the voice of the majority. The majority usually, over time, moves in the right direction, it seems to me.

But certainly there are voices with power that are anti-science in America right now. It doesn't seem to matter to many Americans that the majority of experts in a particular field are solidly convinced of something. My uneducated opinion seems to count as much as someone who can actually do the math.

But maybe it has always been this way. It just seems that now the anti-evidence voices control the textbooks.

d. postmodernism
Anyone who knows me well knows that I believe there are important insights to be gained from postmodernism. But even to say that puts it in a framework of truth.

Postmodernism has--it at least feels to me--eroded the scholarly pursuit of objective truth and encouraged a certain kind of ideological tribalism in America. From my earlier posts, you can tell that I believe the Enlightenment quest for truth and objectivity was a core basis for the prosperity and egalitarianism of Western culture. Everyone stands equally before the court of truth and the court of law.

Sure, postmodernism has made it abundantly clear that this goal is ultimately a dream. But it is a dream we must continue to pursue!

Unfortunately, Christians have sometimes, without realizing it, jumped on this bandwagon. If all positions are really animals in a circus, then we can be in the circus too. But ideological tribalism is inherently deconstructive to the framework of Western society.

The values of equality can sometimes blur into this deconstructive arena. So we value women equally to men so we give them equal voice. Absolutely. But in any instance where feminism begins to say, "You cannot communicate with us because you are a man. Your truth is a different truth than our truth," at that point feminism has become the enemy of democracy. A democracy can only thrive if there is a core, common truth shared by all.

And so when "presuppositionalism" makes it such that the different parts of society cannot communicate with each other on some common playing field, it has become deconstructive of democracy.

Those are some thoughts. Hopefully there are some insights in there. If not, I welcome your critique, for I believe in a truth that is common to all and, most importantly, common to God.

Exceptional America

I continue my musings over the trail of Christianity in Western culture, now contemplating in what ways America is a Christian nation and whether we are in a decline of some sort at present. Previous posts include:

• Did Constantine and Theodosius make Rome Christian?
• When did Europe become Christian?
• Theories of Western decline
• A more dialectical view
• Wesley, Arminius, and the Enlightenment
• Judeo-Christian Values of America
• The Christian Foundations of America

1. I am quite proud of the United States. I want to remention a couple things I have said in my musings thus far. I believe that Wesleyan-Arminian theology is the best translation of biblical theology into the modern world. I believe that the Enlightenment was, in several key respects, a good thing in the history of humanity. I believe the two fit well together, the best of Christianity wed to the best of human thinking at a particular time in a particular respect.

I can imagine that those comments might make some uncomfortable. On the one hand, I'm affirming the "right things." I'm affirming Wesleyanism. I'm affirming America. But I'm not affirming them in the way people normally affirm them, namely, as some straightforward implementation of a biblical worldview. Still more dangerous, am I suggesting that Western civilization in the Enlightenment actually was superior in some way to other civilizations at that particular point in time?!

2. First, let me affirm strongly that all people are of equal value (a tenet of the New Testament and Western civilization). Let me also quote a line from Men in Black: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals." The point of the quote is that there are plenty of smart individuals out there. But at any given time, the bulk of humanity is basically herd animal.

So there are equally smart people of any race, gender, or status. Always have been. The intellectual capacity of the smartest ancient Egyptian was no wit less than Einstein. To say that there might have been something exceptional about Western civilization in the Enlightenment is not to say that individuals in the Western world were/are smarter or better than individuals elsewhere in space and time. It is not to say that Enlightenment Europe was exceptional in all respects. It is not even to say that Western civilization has continued to be exceptional in these areas...

As an aside, I saw a silly slogan the other day poking fun at the metric system. It basically pointed out that the one country that doesn't use the metric system is the only one that has been to the moon. What is ironic about this quote is that it is some American taking credit for the achievements of scientists, all of whom used the metric system in their calculations to get us to the moon!

In other words, the person who created this meme is not exceptional as an individual (at least not in science) and has no business taking any credit for going to the moon. Being American doesn't make you exceptional even if there would turn out to be something exceptional about America. Indeed, I consider prevalent attitudes like this one more a possible sign of America's decline.

... What I am, gulp, wondering is whether the Enlightenment that took place in Europe in many respects represented a high mark in history up to that point in terms of human rationality. As a consequence, I am suggesting that the Western democracies that issued from that thinking might represent the best form of human government yet in human history. The world has followed suit, of course, to where representational democracies exist all around the world today.

And, yes, I am pondering whether this approach to government, as as a structure for society, is most "Christian" and "biblical," not in that the model comes from Scripture, but that it results most in the kind of society that most loves its neighbor as itself and best models the character of God as love.

3. First, the character of God. The best explanation for the existence of evil that I have heard, while affirming that God is love, is that God enables us to be free to choose between good and evil (see here, here, and here). It is the affirmation that a world in which we are able to choose between good and evil is a better world than one in which we are forced to choose the good. But if God gives us the freedom to choose, some will make the wrong choice, and there will be evil.

This is not only a quintessentially Wesleyan explanation for evil in the light of God's character. It also fits extremely well with the Enlightenment values of freedom and moral responsibility. I believe it fits with the Bible, but it is not precisely an explicit biblical teaching (the other side errs, IMO, by confusing the "that time" of the Bible with the "all time"). It grows out of the biblical affirmation that God is love and that God is sovereign and yet that evil continues to exist.

It does not fit, however, with the Puritan way of viewing the world. The Puritans believed it was beholden on them to make everyone in New England live the right way. Freedom of religious viewpoint was not part of their worldview. The founding fathers rejected this aspect of early America and strongly opposed a state church.

But it was part of the essential DNA of the founding of the United States, and it has become part of the essence of the democracies of the world today. In that sense, those forces in America today that would insist on forcing the culture to be Christian in ways that do not involve the concrete harm of others are actually "unamerican" and, I would argue, based on a mistaken understanding of God.

4. Next, the ethical command to love our neighbor. While we are still working out the kinks, the Constitution was structured to 1) favor the benefit of the majority while 2) considering all individuals to have equal rights under the law. What is this but the optimal working out of the love of neighbor in society?

To be sure, these claims were, in reality, a farce as long as slavery existed. They were a farce for as long as women were not given a voice. Unfortunately, they remain to some extent still aspirational today to the extent that there is so much unfairness. As long as the rich can break the law in ways that the poor cannot, this vision is still unattained. As long as the color of one's skin results in unequal treatment under the law, then the ideal of the Constitution is not yet fully achieved.

The Bill of Rights, in this respect, is incredibly important. It keeps a majority from oppressing a minority. In Egypt, the majority Muslim brotherhood tried to vote out the rights of the minority. The same has been happening in Turkey. The Bill of Rights say that a Christian majority in America would not be allowed to vote America to have Christian laws that are based on specific Christian understandings that are not translatable to universal rights and laws (i.e., that cannot be formulated in terms of concrete harm to others).

This wisdom resulted from the struggles of Europe in the days after the Reformation. The fathers would have no state church in the US. There would be neither Henry VIII or Bloody Mary. There would be no Oliver Cromwell either. There would be no Cotton Mather even. It would be a place where the Quakers and Pilgrims could be different from the Puritans without fear of persecution.

The South got upset in the 1960s when the federal government forced it to allow African-Americans to have the same rights as "whites." But this is the genius of America. The majority cannot abuse the minority. It is not just about majority rule. It is also about minority rights. This is, when it works right, the best structural embodiment of the love of neighbor in history, now adopted by nations all over the world. And the US was the first to implement it structurally. That was exceptional.

5. What is exceptional about this structure, now the structure of governments all over the world, is the goal of the neutrality of government in arbitrating the rights of individuals and groups. What is exceptional in this structure is the goal of the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people--a value set forth by Jeremy Bentham in the 1700s. This goal--the greatest happiness for the greatest number--stood at the base of Adam Smith's capitalism (also set forth in the 1700s). To the extent that capitalism departs from this goal--the greatest happiness for the greatest number--it becomes unamerican and has deviated from its founding purpose.

These are ideas from the Enlightenment. They embody the core absolutes of Scripture, IMO, but these specific structures for society were not developed with such force until the 1700s in England in the flow of the Enlightenment.

All these structures assumed the rule of reason. Of course the Enlightenment overestimated the rationality of people. But the goal was there. Voters and representatives would follow the rules of logic and the inference of evidence in all their conduct.

It was this insistence on objectivity, rationality, and empiricism that drove the scientific revolution. The Industrial Revolution had much about it that was not ideal or Christian, but the blessings of scientific discovery have followed from these twin stars of logic and empiricism.

Because even rational people disagree, the founding fathers implemented Montesquieu's balance of powers. An executive branch would capture the benefits of a monarchy without the unlimited power. A legislative branch would capture the voice of the people--one house would be more populist, the other would represent regions. A judiciary, elected for life, would arbitrate, so that the pressures of culture at moments in history could not overrun the structural rights.

What an ingenious system! It has taken over 200 years to see this structure work out many of the prejudices of the founding fathers themselves. A slave is not 3/5 of a person. A woman can think as well as a man. But what an exceptional experiment America has been, and the best of the world has followed suit.

Perhaps my next post will finally get to the point. In what respects might America then potentially be in decline?