Moral Decency
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
--John Adams
“The Law given from Sinai [The Ten Commandments] was a civil and municipal as well as a moral and religious code.”
--John Quincy Adams
The founding fathers had incredible foresight. They understood that for the Constitution to serve as a perpetual guarantor of individual freedoms, the people and the social order must be guided by an absolute moral standard. When our Constitutional freedoms are grounded in the unstable footings of moral relativism, they are only a step away from extinction. Our liberties and our social order are preserved by the assertion of moral absolutes.
At the dawn of our nation, God was considered to be the source of moral values—that which was considered to be moral or immoral transcended personal or societal opinion.
Regrettably, we seem to be allowing moral relativists an opportunity to re-assert pre-Christian values on our society. Historians Olivia and Robert Temple explain what this means:
We probably tend to underestimate the ethical transformation of Western culture which came about as a result of Christianity. In the West today there is also much brutality, violence, and corruption, but among all of that there is also a widespread public consensus that it is a good thing to be kind to children, to care about the unfortunate, to help one’s neighbor, to assist the elderly across busy streets, and to come to the assistance of someone in distress who may be drowning or being murdered in the street. But these attitudes seem to have been absent in ancient Greece except in the case of occasional individuals… The law of the jungle seemed to prevail in the world of men as well as of animals…
--Aesop: The Complete Fables (New York, Penguin: 1998).
In today’s secular society, “rights without responsibilities” has become the dominant moral theme. In this paradigm, each individual is free to decide what is considered to be “right” and “wrong.” Morality is reduced to a mater of “personal preference,” social etiquette is replaced by animal instinct.
Consequently, we have allowed indecency to prevail in our courts, in our schools, in our media, in our businesses, and in our government. If we fail to change the course of our country, we are destined to go the way of other failed civilizations and to follow a rather undesirable, uncivil path along the way.
“I verily believe Christianity necessary to the support of civil society. One of the beautiful boasts of our municipal jurisprudence is that Christianity is a part of the Common Law... There never has been a period in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as laying its foundations.”
--Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story
“There have been ten generations of Americans since this nation was founded… Each left this nation in a little better condition than they had inherited it from their parents. This is the first generation at risk of doing the opposite. Why? I have come to believe that it is because we failed to acknowledge and discipline ourselves with the spiritual truths that have made us great for these two hundred years—faith, family, country, values.”
--U.S. Senator Zell Miller