America’s Social Crisis

There is a social and political crisis happening in America –few can deny it.  But I believe a case can be made that the chaos in Washington, and in our disgraceful political campaigns, and in the streets of our inner cities and the polarization between blacks and the police, between ‘straights’ and the LGBT community, with the destabilization and fragmentation of families—most of this chaos is an outgrowth of an educational and religious crisis in our institutions of traditional stability and in our homes and hearts as individuals.

 

For two centuries America has been a Christian nation. But in mainstream Christianity now there is often a disconnection between what many Christians say they believe and how they act.  Many are Christian-ish, or ‘Almost Christian,’ as a recent and illuminating book by Kenda Creasy Dean on teenagers and the American church is titled (Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian, Oxford University Press, 2010; from the report of the hugely significant National Study of Youth and Religion). Our youth and young adults have a lukewarm religiosity at best.  Few are deeply committed and passionate about their faith—with one conspicuous religious denomination as an exception. (See the chapter titled ‘Mormon Envy’ by this Princeton University Theological Seminary non Latter-day Saint professor.) But America’s young people can’t be too harshly faulted; they learned it from their parents’ shallow hour-a-week (at best) or hour-a-month religiosity that is insufficient to build moral character or a moral base.

In education, especially higher education, the disconnection with religion and traditional values is intentional. It has been eroding at an increasing rate for the last half century.

Our young people, Millennials most notedly, lack an understanding of the past and a vision of the future and find themselves in an impoverished and nihilistic present.  Self-aggrandizement in social media, video games, banal television and movies and violence in sport, escapism drugs and pornography have supplanted good books, creative work, broad study, wholesome recreation, community and public service and committed family-building as the focus of life for far too many.

    

Moreover, there is now more of a focus on ‘self’ than at any time in my life.  New York Times and radio media columnist David Brooks,  in a recent newspaper column titled ‘The Shame Culture has become new moral system’, says social media has created a shallow and insecure Shame Culture’ that is terribly damaging to our youth. But it is different than the old-school traditional ‘shame culture’ (shame on you!).  In today’s ‘shame culture’ it is how many ‘friends’ young people have on social media (if you don’t have many you are a ‘loser’) and their judgments on ‘likes and dislikes.  Many only look outward long enough to say they are ‘tolerant’ and ‘inclusive’ (their highest stated, but not internalized, virtues) but the mobs and demonstrations and rallies belie their professions.  Their method of persuasion is incivility and ‘shame-ing’ and belittling  others to believing their way.  And what is their ‘way’?  Few could tell you their world view. 

    

Question:  How are we taught to respond to our environment—political, social, moral, demographic, even ecological?  Do you even remember being taught?

My answer for young or old:  Get involved.  Get involved with your family, your church, your community; get involved with those who need you, who you can help.  Put down your cell phone and give of yourself.  In short, JUST START SERVING.  David Brooks’ 2015 book, The Road to Character is a wonderful resource to helping us become involved politically, socially, and personally by showing us real people who made a difference how it is done. 

The marquee to my university invites: Enter to Learn; Go forth to Serve. I think of it every day. 

 

I end with Theodore Roosevelt, from his April 1910 speech in Paris, Citizenship in a Republic, which summed it up well in a paragraph from that talk that was later titled “The Man in the Arena”:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Would it be asking too much from our political leadership and from ourselves to re-subscribe to these noble words [paraphrased] from our greatest president over 150 years ago?

“We here highly resolve that these dead [or any who have given their all for the values this country once stood for] shall not have died [or lived] in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom [and of families and a noble citizenry] -- and that government [and institutions] of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

                                                      President Abraham Lincoln