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by Patrick Killough [04/25/1997] One of my three brothers-in-law teaches social studies in a Southern public high school. His students’ racial composition has changed. Their socioeconomic status is not the same. Mastery of the elements of reading and reckoning is not what it used to be. Too many students cannot say why they believe some behavior is good and some is bad. My brother-in-law and his wife, my sister, exchange views with my wife and me on these and other subjects. They hear me think aloud or on paper about religion in public life and on the relation between religion and morals. Every so often they and others jerk my chain and say, “Whoa! It’s not like that any more--if it ever was.” What facts do I claim which they say are no longer the case? My thought runs something like this: --Most Americans learn their morals from their religion--not from philosophy or original thinking or from the United States Supreme Court. --Most Americans learn their religion from their mother, who teaches them to pray and to love God. They deepen their respect for their religion if they also see their father religiously observant and bowing to God’s will. --For most of our nation’s history political leaders beginning with Washington, Jefferson, John Adams along with observers of the American scene such as Tocqueville have acknowledged that most people take their morals from religion. No thinking person insists that morality can only be learned from religion--at least in theory. But historically that de facto linkage has been observed, acknowledged, respected and cherished by political leaders, at least more often than not. At least so say I. Naturally, I also trot out stacks of books and articles which back me up. Like much social history, the data are soft and debatable. My brother-in-law and sister reply, “get real!” Judge Robert H. Bork In his 1996 book, SLOUCHING TOWARDS GOMORRAH: MODERN LIBERALISM AND AMERICAN DECLINE, Robert H. Bork describes the challenge which overwhelmed an older generation: assimilating and acculturating citizens born between 1946 and 1964, the Baby Boomers. By the time this wave of newcomers reached college age they had known little of the deprivation their parents had faced in the Great Depression. Their youthful leaders were unaccustomed to hard physical labor. They expected never to be poor. They were bored, so they erupted on campuses and in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic convention. In Bork’s views, this “vertical invasion of the barbarians” (a phrase from Walter Rathenau) meant only massive trouble for the traditional role of parents and organized religion as the teachers of morality. Where was Patrick Killough in the 1960s? People remind me that while this “vertical invasion” of the United States was underway I was out of the loop. For I was abroad as a Foreign Service Officer in places like Hong Kong, Afghanistan, Viet-Nam and Pakistan. Meanwhile American teachers and policemen and pastors and others were dealing with young people increasingly tempted by the Playboy Philosophy, television, consumer advertising and growing access to contraceptives (not much of any of that in Afghanistan or Pakistan). In addition, American courts had to fill moral/political vacuums which had once been reserved for increasingly cowed legislatures--so I was told. ) Here is the view of my relatives and friends in the trenches of 1997. Far more of the young than was imaginable around 1960 --are taught neither religion by their mothers nor respect for it by their fathers, --cannot name even three or four of the ten Commandments either because they do not belong to an organized religious community or if they do, that community emphasizes things other than the will of God. Quite a few of my teacher friends now judge that their students of any age are more likely to learn their morals from the TV, the cinema or the Internet. After all many youngsters spend more “quality” hours before screens and monitors than speaking or working or worshiping or recreating with their parents or in their church circles. And do not forget teen peer pressure. Is an inner city teacher today more likely to have in class members of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes or of the Sharks and the Jets? And yet: we still observe young mothers
teaching their children to pray. We still see fathers taking their
children to synagogues. Most politicians I know still prefer
that parents and grandparents and, after them, religion be
the ones to teach children what is right and wrong.
for Asheville TRIBUNE
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