The Best Friend to American Liberty

By: American Decency Staff

by Chris Johnson It has been said that America rests on a three legged stool and the three legs are faith, family, and freedom. If you break one of those legs, the country falls. Today's political landscape and data like that mentioned in this article makes it pretty easy to see that termites are feasting on all three of those legs. Ministries like ours have said for a long time that strong families are the building blocks of a strong America. On the sign in front of our building, we have posted a quote by George Washington. "Religion and morality are the essential pillars of civil society." John Adams said something similar, "Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not only of republicanism and of all free government, but of social felicity under all governments and in all the combinations of human society." John Witherspoon also concurred, "He is the best friend to American liberty, who is most sincere and active in promoting true and undefiled religion, and who sets himself with the greatest firmness to bear down profanity and immorality of every kind." And, just so we don't think these titans were referring to some vague religion, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French philosopher who toured the United States and published a book describing and titled, "Democracy in America," clarifies what religion it was that governed the citizens of young America. "In the United States the influence of religion is not confined to the manners, but it extends to the intelligence of the people.. Christianity, therefore reigns without obstacle, by universal consent; the consequence is, as I have before observed, that every principle of the moral world is fixed and determinate." That's pretty much the opposite of where we are today. Political scientist Dr. Charles Murray says [in his highly acclaimed new book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010â€Â] that America is coming apart at the seams of class. We have heard a lot about class warfare lately, most notably in the dialogue produced by the "Occupy movement" which  seeks to pit the 99% against the 1%, but the inequality of the "classes" is not the issue that Murray points to. Murray's concern is that what were once known as "American virtues" no longer define a large percentage Americans. "When the founders created the country they said very openly and explicitly, 'this isn't going to work unless you have people who have certain kinds of virtues.' And [these] were the virtues that they all zeroed in on. You cannot have a free society under the Constitution they created without marriage. You can't have it without religiosity in the people. You can't have it without industriousness and you can't have it without a high level of honesty. So what I'm saying is we are getting a larger and larger proportion of the population that no longer has the founding virtues that are necessary in order to be self governing in the most fundamental sense of that word." Murray goes on to explain that the line between Americans who have strong marriages, religion, and a good work ethic is, for a variety of reasons, drawn between the upper-middle class (bachelor's degree, employed as manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media) and the working class (high school diploma, employed in blue collar job, low skill service job, or low skill white collar job). "When Americans used to brag about 'the American way of life'—a phrase still in common use in 1960—they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity. Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions." Murray uses single motherhood as an example."The data also indicate, though, that the norm of single birth is now pushing into the twenties and thirties which says to me this is no longer a teenage girl who is in the back seat of a car and made a mistake. We're talking about mature women who say, 'well, this is the way that you form families. You have a baby and you don't have a guy to go along with it.'" On this point, The Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield make a similar argument.  Marriage is something to be desired in the lower income population, but it is looked at differently in lower class culture than it is in the upper class. "It isn’t because these men and women don’t value marriage. In fact, just the opposite is true. Marriage is valued so highly in low-income populations that it has become a crowning event – a ceremony symbolizing arrival into the middle class – rather than a crucial pathway leading to the attainment of middle-class status. Having children – also extremely valued – occurs on the pathway to marriage, not afterward." Rector and Sheffield also noticed the trend of two developing cultures based on income levels. These researchers, however, tie the breakdown of lower income families to their lower economic position. " This difference in marriage and childbearing patterns between low-income young adults and their educated peers has led to a society that is steadily splitting into a two-caste system – with marriage and education as the dividing line. In the higher-income third of the population, children are raised by college-educated, married parents; in the lower-income third, children are raised by single parents with no more than a high school education. Indeed, marriage decreases poverty at all education levels. The effectiveness of marriage in preventing poverty is the equivalent of adding five to six years to a parent’s education, the data indicate. Beyond the economic effects, of course, marriage has a wide variety of other benefits for adults and children." Rector and Sheffield provide a startling statistic to show exactly the importance of marriage to the economy. "Today, over 40 percent of U.S. births – four in 10 – occur outside marriage. In 1960, it was below one in 10. The trend isn’t limited to just a few states, either… Couple this trend with the finding that children born outside marriage are roughly five times as likely to be poor as those born to married parents, and we have a recipe for economic disaster." Not only has American culture diverged into different cultures for different classes, but the lifestyle increasingly taking hold in working class households is a downward spiral into both immorality and poverty. ­­ So how do we get back? Rector's, Sheffield's and Murray's answer is that the upper class simply needs to tell the lower class how it's supposed to be done. Rector says, "A good place to start: simply telling boys and girls that it’s important to wait to have a baby until after marriage." That is true, but going out there and telling people to stop having babies before you're married or the country is going to fall apart is not enough. Murray says something similar, but, I think, a little better, " So what we are talking about here is not the loss of some nostalgic former way of living… We're talking about the basics, and when these deteriorate in 'Fishtown,' as they have deteriorated, the effects are human effects. They are effects on the ability of people to live satisfying lives." It's tempting to come to the conclusion that Rector's article does, "the promise of the American Dream depends on strong marriage," but we as Christians know better.  The promise of the American Dream rests on God, and, as always, it is the church's responsibility to show people that to live a satisfying life they need to live for God. As a consequence of Godly lives, they will have strong families, and as a result of strong families, we will have a strong America. ========================================================== To support our efforts please click here or mail your gift to American Decency Association (ADA), PO Box 202, Fremont, MI 49412. American Decency Association is a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.

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