“Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith; but they have seen religion in the ranks of their adversaries, and they inquire no further; some of them attack it openly, and the remainder are afraid to defend it.” Alexis de Tocqueville
Those who settled the United States learned from hard experience that obedience to God’s law is a prerequisite of national greatness. But their children soon forgot just like the children of the greatest empires of the past.
A year before the U.S. Constitution was ratified, Edward Gibbon published the final volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in which he identified five major causes behind the fall. Declining demographics didn’t make the list nor did insufficient technology or climate change. According to Gibbon, the root cause of Roman societal collapse was their loss of civic virtue and individual morality.
Edmund Burk and George Washington agreed with Gibbon that the safeguards of society were not military legions or productive merchants or prosperous consumers but high morals and sincere religion. Yet most politicians and educators today reject this belief.
In The Character of Nations, Angelo Codevilla wrote that there was a strong tendency among early Americans “to equate themselves with the children of Israel.” That is why they studied the Bible. That is why they sought to obey the Ten Commandments. That is why their children learned the histories of when ancient Israel turned to sin and suffered invasion, and when it turned to God and was liberated. Nowhere else in the world was the notion of God as moral lawgiver so widespread.
But that all changed around the turn of the 20th century, when educators began rejecting the idea that laws of morality were eternal and unchanging. As the evolutionary hypothesis took root in the public conscience, people came to believe that what was right in the past may not be right today. Biblical commandments like “honor your father and mother” and “thou shalt not commit adultery” were abandon and the evolving morality of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud were embraced, utterly transforming the moral landscape of today’s world.
The consequence of moving away from traditional morality has had major implications for the nation and, by extension, the world. Today, one-third of American children grow up without their biological father. People can argue that these children are no worse off but the facts prove otherwise.
Children who grow up without a father figure are 4 times more likely to be poor, 9 times more likely to drop out of school, 11 times more likely to commit violent crimes, and 20 times more likely to be arrested.
There is a direct link between the destruction of the family and the increase of violent crime, which has doubled since 1960, and the increase of means-tested welfare which has also doubled. According to projections by the CBO, rising entitlement spending and interest on the national debt will consume 99% of all tax revenues within the coming decade. This means the nation’s entire discretionary-spending budget will be financed by debt.
To quote John Adams, “The foundations of national morality must be laid in private families” It takes strong families to produce upstanding citizens capable of providing for themselves. When a nation begins to look instead to its government to provide, it is on a path to collapse.
Today, America is more divided and polarized than any other time since the Civil War, and the moral decay is now manifesting in violence and chaos in our streets. Truth and reality are drowned out by the shrill voices, revisionist history reigns, and propaganda has set the narratives that have created many Americans participating in a mass delusion.
“Families are the ties that remind us of yesterday, provide strength and support today, and give us hope for tomorrow. No government, no matter how well-intentioned, or well-managed, can provide what our families provide.” Bill Owens