Have Television and Government Ousted the Church as America’s Moral Guide?
The church has always been the best guardian of morals. At least in the past. It was free, too. Now a powerful new “common core” has captured the hearts and minds of moderate Americans. Media, government, and public education drive public “morality” today–and speak with one liberal voice about what’s right and wrong.
Sure, the church choir will always remain the faithful nucleus of most congregations. But are sermons becoming so abstract and without relevance that many of the “churched” no longer pay attention to moral instruction? Perhaps “going to church” has become like “going to college”–just being in attendance will guarantee results.
Television programs (including news, dramas, documentaries, and commercials) now do little to hide their real mission: teaching their own common core of radical moral values. You know what they are. Most viewers accept without questioning.
The majority of local news is caught up with promoting charities and private welfare initiatives–as if television is not only the “voice of the community” but also its social conscience. After all, television now has a “faithful” allegiance. Food welfare will triumph, and parents won’t have to buy coats and toys for their own children this Christmas.
Government has engineered a monopoly of liberal programming, with no voices from the political right in sight. Ownership of stations is largely hidden from public view, but the brave new moral instruction penetrates deeply into the popular psyche.
Some might argue that law and government try to base their principles on the foundation of Christianity and Judaism. But the secular approximation of morality is little more than an ethical stance that people don’t find binding in any absolute sense. “What can I get away with?” serves as a question of conscience when God isn’t watching.
In his “Big Government Can’t Fix Immorality” essayist Trevor Thomas argues that big government first creates then attempts to solve a society’s burgeoning load of sin and immorality: “We see it time and again. Whether the problem is poverty, bad schools, gun violence, crime in general, or even the spread of disease, the liberal answer is always the same: more government. The recent gun debate raging in America illustrates this well.”
Schools have gotten rid of the free system of moral guidance that both schools and families have relied on for centuries. Bad behavior is put off limits by those libertarians who favor an “anything goes” society. To criticize is to profile implies Thomas:
When dealing with the immorality that is destroying our nation, good government must recognize what it takes truly to change bad behavior — something that “gets to the heart” of individuals, to quote the officials in Camden — and, at best, partner with such efforts, or at least do nothing to hinder them.
In other words, we can’t have a government that encourages sexual immorality, be it through taxpayer-funded abortions, promiscuous sexual education, or the promotion of homosexuality, and then wants to pay for the consequences of such immorality with billions in taxpayer-funded welfare. We can’t have a government that seeks to cure poverty or violence with a godless secular education system. We can’t have a government, as Grover Cleveland put it, that “encourages the expectation of paternal care” while weakening “the sturdiness of our national character.”
In other words, we don’t need a government that thinks that it can, through mere secular means, cure all that ails our culture. We need a government (of course, that means elected officials) that understands that truly to change someone, truly to change behavior, requires getting to the heart of individuals. And of course, this requires spiritual efforts, and we all know where that leads.
