A recent article published by AT ended with the following ominous sentences: “If the USA is unlikely to become once again an overwhelmingly Christian nation (and this seems to be the case), where will we turn for a new morality? Is it possible that we are now entering a century or so of moral anarchy?”
“Moral anarchy”? Is this an accurate term, or is it an understatement of the moral decline we are living through? Are terms like “moral degeneracy” and “moral collapse” better expressions of what we are facing?
Every perversion known to mankind is being embraced and gradually legalized. The idea that morality is created by each individual as he makes decisions throughout each day is a step beyond anarchy.
Since Lawrence v. Texas decriminalized homosexuality, we have been in a state of moral anarchy. Crude and licentious parades with many naked or almost naked men celebrating sodomy are considered by many to be positive and invigorating.
The abrogation of Roe v. Wade in the recent Dobbs decision does not end abortion, but simply leaves the existence of abortion laws up to each separate state. There are so many different laws now on when it is legitimate to abort a baby. Thus, the people have decided that it is legitimate for citizens to decide when a life is a life. The truth is that a life begins and is a life at conception. That is what the Holy Bible teaches and has been the basis of the sanctity of life — announced even in our Declaration of Independence — for thousands of years.
Additionally, the inefficacy of jailing people for many crimes based on the claim that those crimes are not really serious crimes or, as crimes, can be prevented by patience or therapy is now accepted by many prosecutors, including Chesa Boudin, who was removed from his D.A. position in San Francisco (even the San Fran lefties were turned off by his policies), and by Alvin Bragg and other prosecutors in New York City’s five boroughs. Kim Foxx in Chicago and Larry Krasner, D.A. in Philadelphia, are also notorious catch-and-release D.A.s. They claim that they do not want to waste precious financial resources by jailing people. In NYC, in addition to this policy resulting in an uptick in thefts and assaults, we are back to rampant turnstile-jumping in the subways instead of paying fares. Also, aggressive panhandling has become more common, and looting and pilfering have become epidemic.
As further evidence of our moral decline, divorce rates are sky-high, and marriage rates and childbearing are at an all-time low. Academic standards have plummeted, and standards in every area of life have been lowered. SAT reading scores were in the 520s in the early 1970s but had dropped to the 490s by the years 2011–2016.
This writer was in a NYC hospital for major surgery, and neither a resident nor a fully licensed M.D. was in charge of the heart wing. Supervision rested exclusively with nurse practitioners and physician assistants. An M.D. showed up with a P.A. to tell me what day I was to be discharged. And my surgeon showed up briefly to tell me he would not need to saw apart my breastbone, and then immediately left without any additional comments about the surgery or the aftermath. No M.D. or any other personnel ever came to my bedside to ask me how I was sleeping or whether I was experiencing any pain or other discomforts, nor did anyone listen to my heart with a stethoscope. No one explained to me what I could expect on the day of surgery or after surgery in terms of procedures or how I might or might not feel. Despite the rhetoric often spouted these days about “treating the whole person,” cost efficiency clearly reigned. The pre-eminence of cost efficiencies over professionalism and care is itself a symptom of moral anarchy and disdain for the personhood of the patient.
If the balance sheet consistently takes precedence over the purpose of an institution, whether that institution be a hospital, a school, a police department, or any service-oriented company, then morality is under attack. A high school teacher this writer knows in NYC was told that all the history teachers on a certain day would be required to distribute condoms to students. He was convinced that his duty was not to promote teenage fornication and decided to toss the condoms once they were delivered to him. However, on the day intended for distribution, an announcement was made over the public address system in the school that a special office for condoms had been opened and that they would not be distributed in history classes.
That happened to that teacher in the 1990s. Moral anarchy had already kicked in. One of the history teacher’s students — a 19-year-old girl in tenth grade — introduced him to her boyfriend, whom she identified as “the father of the child I aborted two years ago.” Moral anarchy might be another way of saying “moral collapse.”
In 1960, only 5% of babies were born out of wedlock. Since 2015, the overall percentage is about 40%, with 69% of African-American babies born outside of wedlock. One may ask the rhetorical question: are these percentages signs of responsible (i.e., moral) behavior, or do the statistics show a collapse of morality?
Does our national indebtedness, whereby each individual citizen owes over one hundred thousand dollars of our national debt as of December 2023, suggest a responsible government? Does anyone even ask how one can be irresponsible and moral at the same time? From the Bible tale of the prodigal son, we learn that profligacy creates alienation and despair. A country or a household or individuals who are regularly spending far beyond their means, and are gambling billions in lotteries and casinos, thereby indulging their greed, are, based on that trend alone, in moral free fall. Gambling is a pastime for some people, but it is driven by covetousness, and wherever casinos abound, we see prostitution and drug sales abounding as well.
Even in the early 19th century, William Wilberforce, a great English Christian spokesman, saw that morals needed to be reformed and restored based on biblical principles. He was the key player in bringing an end to slavery in the British Empire, but he saw even then how much moral reform still was needed by the Brits and established a Society for the Suppression of Vice to promote that reform.
What would Wilberforce think about the rampant crime, licentiousness, greed, violence, and corruption of public morals we are experiencing today? Moral anarchy seems to be an understatement of the moral disintegration we are living through.
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