Liberals used to occupy the moral high ground in American politics. Operating from a Christian ethic of generosity and kindness, Christian Democrats in the highly Christian and democratic American culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s succeeded in making conservative Republicans look like nothing but so many selfish churls.
Then several things happened. First, television ownership became widespread in the late 50s. Nearly everybody, even the working poor, had a black-and-white TV. With this came the rise of the cancer of commercialism that is increasingly strangling us. The purpose of commercial television is not to entertain or to inform. It is to deliver an audience to a sponsor – to get you to watch, so the advertisers can pitch their products to you. Quality programs that don’t deliver an audience get cancelled. Cheap and exploitive programs that deliver an audience become national sensations. Advertisers soon learned that sex, violence and controversy are the main things that draw attention, and began to exploit all three to sell products. America became increasingly violent, oversexed and uncivil.
Betty Friedan’s book, “The Feminine Mystique,” gave rise to a feminist movement, which in turn gave rise to a liberal Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade, which found that a fetus is not a human being, but only a lump of tissue. The Democratic Party embraced abortion on demand as a woman’s right, and the gender feminists who came to dominate the feminist movement have defended this extreme view ever since, while becoming a major constituency in the Democratic Party base.
The televised movie “Inherit the Wind” popularized Charles Darwin’s 100-year-old theory of evolution. The apparent conflict between the Biblical story of creation and the Darwinist version caused a crisis of faith in American life. On the one hand, you have the beautiful, kind, altruistic teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. On the other, you have the merciless Darwinist ethic of survival of the fittest, power to the strong, and death to the weak, that leaves little room for generosity. Simply put, Christianity fell out of vogue. Secular liberals embraced Darwinism, out of a profound distrust of the institutional church – a distrust that the church has unfortunately earned – and drove Christians to the margins of the Democratic Party. Christians are welcome to stay and give money and vote Democratic, but must remain quiet about their faith, like an embarrassing old uncle. Conservatives, on the other hand, embraced Darwinism, because it painted rich people as superior to everybody else, and relieved them of any responsibility to care for those less fortunate.
The Watergate scandal shook Americans’ confidence in their government. The workings of the Nixon administration, brought to the light of day, created the impression that those in government had been lying to us all along. Instead of being a noble institution that is all about the common good, government appeared to be a cynical power struggle and nothing else. Worse, because those who made the laws did not obey the laws, Americans began to lose respect for the law, and increasingly take the Darwinist view that life is every man for himself.
The advent of the birth control pill ushered in an age of sexual freedom, overpowering the Christian teaching of sex during marriage only. At the same time, the increasing absence of parents from the home due to feminism, and the commercial media’s glorification of sex as a way to sell products, led to an epidemic of out-of-wedlock births, despite the pill’s availability and effectiveness. This, coupled with Roe v Wade, in turn gave rise to an epidemic of abortion. The appalling reality of millions of innocent human lives being extinguished every year drove millions of well-meaning Christians into the arms of the Republican Party. The Republicans used the votes of these Christians to elect Presidents who packed the Supreme Court with conservative judges. But instead of overturning Roe v Wade, the Supremes in their 2010 Citizens United ruling brought to reality the long-cherished Republican dream of dismantling American democracy, and handing the government over to the corporations and the very rich. Republicans have always thought these should be the people who run everything.
This is only a partial list of the factors. The upshot is that as a Christian, I have a choice. I can be marginalized and shushed by the Democrats, and agree to the continued wholesale slaughter of innocent human life, or I can be cynically used by the Republicans, who promise the moon on abortion but deliver next to nothing, while they complete their agenda of making sure that the sovereign power of government lies not with the people, but the almighty dollar.
Do you hear that crumbling sound?
Phil Jones is a minister, a musician and a teacher. He can be reached at [email protected]
