What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? (35 page)

The moralistic worrywarts insist that we’ve lost our way. They claim we’re alienated from our traditions, our values, and ourselves. The family is under attack. The culture is mired in indulgence and greed. And then there are the boneheads who text while driving. We are spiritually adrift and it’s all circling the drain of societal decay. What we need is a return to the traditional values that made us a better people once upon a time, whenever that was.

Well, it’s my contention that the 21
^st
century West is the most moral civilization that has ever existed, and that much of this is due to our rejection of what most people think of as traditional religious values.

Now, where do I get off saying this in an anything-goes culture where you can practically MapQuest your G-spot? We have clashes over gay marriage, contraception, stem cell research, sex education, abortion rights, and senators treating public restrooms like singles bars. Plus all the personal traumas that Oprah has spent a career talking about. How can a society carrying so much baggage call itself moral?

Well, first of all, most of our really serious problems have been around forever; we just didn’t talk about them until now. Take single motherhood. One-third of the children in colonial Lexington and Concord were born out of wedlock. But nobody printed this in the newspapers. School dropout rates were higher a century ago than they are today and church attendance was far lower. The mistreatment of women, children, workers, animals, and the environment all received much less attention. Same with most of the social ills that now get theme songs on cable news.

Second, many of the problems that dog the moral doomsayers are only problems to
them.
Visit the huddled masses of Bangladesh or Brazil and it’s clear that birth control can be a
good
thing. Or, if two guys down the street want to tie the knot, it doesn’t crimp my ability to marry a nice girl and start a nice nuclear family with nice nuclear kids. If that’s a problem for some, it’s
their
problem, not society’s. Besides, the hair-pullers themselves aren’t all model citizens. A Harvard study of March 2009 found that the top subscribers to internet porn were the highest “traditional values” states, and other studies reveal the same about divorce and teen pregnancy.

Third, do we really believe our values were better in the days of grim social conformity, silence about sex, and perpetual guilt over natural human feelings? Think about today’s theocratic societies that come down hardest on everything from contraception to miniskirts. You think
they
occupy the moral high ground?

Why is it that, whenever we talk about morality, sexual issues usually lead the discussion? The reason is because we’ve been so successful in resolving the moral concerns that pop up in every other aspect of life. Sure, ethical dilemmas still plague us, and we hardly live up to our ideals. Nobody does. But you’d be hard-pressed to find another civilization in any other period of history that’s done a better job of handling the great moral questions.

Admittedly this may be hard to believe, so why don’t we give our culture a final performance review on the big issues?

Freedom:
Presently we live at the high watermark of personal freedom. In lifestyle, fashion, art, career, mobility, associations, self-expression, and religious preference (or non-preference), we are masters of our individual fates to a greater degree than anyone else. Some think we have too much freedom. But the record shows that it’s better to have a surplus than a shortage. Few of us would prefer a life where the state, or the clergy, or our boss, had the last word on how we lived, what we said, or what we could do behind closed doors without the cops showing up.

Despite the occasional hysterics about Big Government you hear at town hall meetings or on talk radio, freedom in the Good Old Days was far less plentiful. If you were black, female, Jewish, Native American, or just poor, ideas like living where you wanted, voting, owning property, publishing your opinions, or speaking your mind, were frequently just wishful thinking.

Okay, if you’re a white guy whose highest aspirations are to pay no taxes, pollute rivers, and shoot stuff without a permit, the 19
^th
century may have been your Golden Age. Today, that concept of freedom is pretty much limited to groups like the Alaskan Independence Party—if you can call dodging grizzly bears and black helicopters freedom.

But by most measures, we enjoy greater liberty today than we ever did in the God-fearing days of church-state cooperation. In a Christian monarchy, there was plenty of belief in God, but
your
freedom wasn’t on the king’s agenda. In fact, it was often part of the problem. By contrast, we now have a secular government created specifically to defend individual liberties, and there’s even a written list of them. Sure, it doesn’t work as well as we’d like—what does? But it works better than anything that came before, even for free market purists. When have they ever been richer?

Government:
One of the most telling measures of a country’s Gross National Morality is the kind of government it has. Yeah, sure, we bitch about ours night and day because it either does too much or not enough. But in the long, harrowing history of man ruling over man, nothing has topped the justice and moral soundness of the West’s combination platter of democracy, the rule of the law, the rights of man, separation of church and state, separation of powers, private property, free speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of worship.

As we’ve established, none of these are biblical values. There’s nothing about political rights in Scripture. We saw that the pagan culture of ancient Greece came up with democracy and free debate. The Romans pioneered the rule of the law and the rights of man. (Sorry, the Laws of Moses were meant for the Israelites, not everyone—just ask the Canaanites.) In America, it was a bunch of long-haired eastern elites (the guys with all those choice words about religion) who liberated state from church, pinned down property rights, and guaranteed freedom of the press. They fought
against
the traditional values of Christian monarchs and official churches. That’s why we call them revolutionaries.

Law and Order:
While we fret today about crime like it’s a new invention, over a century ago, newspapers decried ghastly crime rates and politicians griped that the court system was slanted in favor of criminals. Today, conviction rates for stuff like robbery and murder are considerably higher than back then.

Of course, a moral society requires fair and just laws, and you can’t name a society that has tried harder on this count than our own. Yet the legal rights we enjoy today are not products of ancient biblical wisdom. The idea that the government needs a reason to arrest you, that you’re innocent until proven guilty, and that human rights apply equally to everyone, everywhere, at all times—these are more recent innovations. They got their start with the Magna Carta in England, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in France (yeah, that’s right, the
French
), and the U.S. Bill of Rights. None of these are Bible-based documents. If they were, observing those rights would have been standard operating procedure for the past 2,000 years and neither France nor America would have needed a revolution.

Marriage and Family:
As mentioned, traditional marriage was usually an economic swap arranged by others, and the bride and groom were the last ones whose opinion mattered. Not a lot of moral enlightenment there. What’s more, in the Olden Days, traditional marriage included polygamy. Half the patriarchs of the Hebrew Bible practiced it or were products of it. And if you’re a young-earth creationist who thinks the earth is 6,000 years old, then you have to believe that both Adam, Noah, and their kin populated the world through incest, which went on for centuries. Kind of puts celebrity sex videos in perspective, doesn’t it?

As for the nuclear family we cherish so much, it’s actually not all that traditional. It’s a modern institution. In earlier eras, people lived in extended families or clans—like a tenant association except you had to remember everyone’s birthday. And they practiced that polygamy thing.

It’s true that half of today’s households are headed by a single parent. But this was often the case in centuries past, when war and illness were frequently responsible. Somehow we survived.

The good news is that, nowadays, our spouses don’t die so often. The bad news is, we sometimes wish they did. We now live long enough to get seriously fed up with one another and sometimes it’s better for all involved, even the children, to let everyone go their own way. Yes, every kid wants and deserves a mom and a dad, and it would be nice if all couples stayed happily together forever. It would be nice if lollipops cured cancer. But they don’t. It does no one any good to pretend a bad marriage is always better than no marriage. Besides, isn’t God a single father?

Anyway, the family is not under threat. Even if marriage is the new dating for some, and people bail out with little provocation, we keep making more of them. The popularity of marriage ebbs and flows, but it never goes out of style. Most of those who do try alternative arrangements come crawling back to monogamy. In fact, marriage is so popular today that Family Values shock troops are in the awkward position of
opposing
certain forms of matrimony as a bad idea. I swear, there’s no pleasing some people.

Children:
What culture has ever been more caring, indulgent, or protective of children? Today we spend much more on their education, their health, their self-esteem, and their fashion sense than we did in the “children should be seen and not heard” days of yesteryear. Ever meet a kid who wished he grew up the way
you
did?

We worry that youth today is too exposed to adult ideas, that fashion and pop culture are sexualizing childhood. To a degree, this is a valid point. But then consider what the average 16-year-old girl was doing through most of human history. Answer: Serving a husband and having babies. Ah, innocent youth.

Women’s Equality:
You gotta be kidding. Only queens (as in female monarchs) achieved anything near equality in the centuries of traditional values, and even that required a few beheadings. Throughout most of history, gender equality wasn’t even a goal. Today, we’ve come so far that even conservatives reject the “women shall keep silent in the churches” attitude espoused by Paul. Sure, we’ve got a ways to go, but at least we’re working on it.

Racial Equality:
Do I even have to make this point? For 5,000 years, being a racial minority almost anywhere meant you could be owned by somebody else. In
Exodus
, God spells out the rules for keeping foreigners as slaves, and he mentions slavery in the Ten Commandments, twice. While both Judaism and Christianity contributed to the idea that all souls are equal before God, somehow this didn’t translate into social policy—as a few million Africans, Indians, and victims of Jim Crow found out.

It’s true that Quaker opposition to slavery goes back to colonial times, and black churches, along with rare birds like John Brown, did invoke the Bible in the cause of racial equality. But they were the exceptions, and they often paid a price. Most old time churches were more concerned with gambling and drunkenness than with abolishing slavery. It took a religious skeptic to write “all men are created equal” before the idea started to have a practical effect, and even he owned slaves. That’s how bad it’s been.

As recently as the 1960s, religion and racial equality were not regarded as an automatic partnership; Martin Luther King’s likening of black Civil Rights to finding the Promised Land was controversial—especially in the more churchy states. Even today, Sunday services are the most segregated hour in American life and, while the election of an African American president does show progress, it’s also stirred up some ugly stuff we hoped had gone the way of witch-burnings.

Still, with all the work we have yet to do, there has never been a time when racial equality was a more widely accepted virtue than it is today. That’s got to mean something.

Religious Tolerance:
Across the world and throughout most of history, religious tolerance was considered a
bad
idea. Consult your first commandment or Taliban field manual. The most enduring conflicts are over religion, and usually between two factions of the same faith. Think about what it’s been like to be Jewish in the Christian world over the past 2,000 years. Or even Protestant in a Catholic country. Or even Mormon in a Baptist county.

In modern times, religious freedom and tolerance have been achieved by
denying
religion its traditional power. As late as 1960, JFK’s Catholicism was a major hurdle en route to the presidency, and it wasn’t the atheists who had their frocks in a twirl about it. It was conservative Protestants. Being Christian wasn’t enough. He had to be the right
kind
of Christian, and he wasn’t.

Today, many of these same evangelicals like to cast themselves as a minority victimized by secular intolerance, all because the government protects the rest of us from their social agenda. Apparently they don’t count the roughly 80% of Americans who call themselves Christian because too many of them insist on teaching only science in science classes and saving the prayers for church. Crazy stuff, I know.

War:
There’s no doubt that the 20
^th
century produced more war victims than any previous age. Much of this was due to the deadly combination of record size populations and more efficient killing technology. War has been taking out large chunks of humanity for a long time. But, in the modern West, your chances of avoiding it are better than ever. Statistically, a male is far more likely to die at the hands of another person in a tribal culture than in the modern West. Pol Pot’s benighted regime exterminated eight percent of his countrymen, while the two world wars, with all their industrial weaponry, saw death rates of less than one percent among the countries in conflict.