First Sentence

"Chapter 1. No More Culture War We are told -- over and over -- that America is in the midst of a Culture War or that our Nation is suffering from profound cultural decline. Over the last thirty years, there has been a "560% increase in violent crime; a 419% increase in illegitimate births; a quadrupling in divorce rates;" and on and on through equally grim statistics on single parent households, children on welfare or in poverty, ever-declining SAT scores or the "dumbing down" of curricula. This book does not take issue with these highly disturbing, but regrettably undeniable, empirical facts. This book does deny that it must necessarily be so. America need not be on a cultural collision course with itself. We can avoid the collision. Please note the emphasis is on we -- you and me -- primarily in our families and churches. In this, we cannot expect Congress or the Supreme Court or a new President to rescue us. Indeed, continuing to rely on these agents will only make matters worse. Cultural differences will always exist, but difference becomes hatred when the law denies family and church its primary role in character formation. When the law preempts the wisdom of father or mother or clergy or seeks to mold through a monolithic educational establishment deliberately alienated from these moral actors, it promotes cultural war and community suspicion and decline. Newsweek's Kenneth Woodward aptly reminds us that in the classics "the cultivation of virtue makes individuals happy, wise, courageous, competent. The result is a good person, a responsible citizen and parent, a trusted leader, possibly even a saint." This book will not pretend to be a handbook to sainthood, but it does suggest that if five principles are observed much of the societal division that now plagues us in war-like fashion can be superseded, if not overcome. First, there must be a recognition that neither law nor politics is the source of personal virtue, or in a larger sense, "cultural virtue" -- that is, the common good. Indeed, the more the law tries to impose or coerce virtue, the more likely it is to instill the opposite, raise false expectations, and worsen social tension. Second, the primary agents in pursuit of cultural and individual virtue must be close at hand, part of what I call, the smaller sovereigns -- church, school, workplace, and especially the American family. Virtue is not something legislated through "three strikes and your out" sentencing laws or welfare reform. Such laws address symptoms. Virtue is something practiced one-to-one. The practice of virtue comes from the observing of responsible parent and upright clergy, the family's closely applied discipline and encouragement of good behavior, and ultimately, in the doing -- of making right choices in sometimes difficult situations. Third, in a modern America where freedom is too easily confused with the selfishness of "autonomy" or individual want or "legal right," cultural virtue depends upon a re-dedication to what I call the "mega-virtues" that underlie the American endeavor: belief in God and a knowable truth. Fourth, beyond the mega-virtues, we must re-learn within the family, or in some families, discover for the first time, the personal cardinal virtues of prudence, temperance, courage and justice. Fifth, family expectation must match family reality. Families must actually perform their intended function as a source of love and emotional support, respect for others, and the taking of responsibility for actions. Our cultural divisions have been unduly "nationalized," and thus artificially magnified, either through the media or Congressional legislation or Supreme Court opinion. These cultural tensions have become near unbearable as one faction or another has sought to enact morality into law, as if legal enactment or judicial pronouncement would somehow rectify moral shortcoming. It's time we fully understand that just as overturning Roe v. Wade will not bring the unborn back to life or even prospectively stop the killing [as state laws could then still authorize the practice]; neither will the passage of FACE [the recently enacted Freedom to Access to Clinic Entrances Act] or FOCA [the pending Freedom of Choice Act] eliminate the moral anxiety over abortion. While there is always some necessary overlap between law and morality, as law implicitly involves a moral claim by its command of obedience, few of us seem to fully appreciate any longer that law cannot force moral consensus or instill virtue or character. That job -- the formation of moral character -- necessarily falls to the family and the assisting smaller sovereigns of church, school, and workplace. Perhaps, it is difficult to conceive of schools and employers as moral instructors because so much of their authority has been sapped by legal and government intrusion. Public schools have lost much of their instructive capacity by Supreme Court interpretation that either actually precludes, or is understood to preclude, all meaningful reliance upon God or religion in the school house. Even were those legal impediments removed, however, the very notion of a public school with a uniform curriculum imposed by a secular and distant government from top-down, and from which only the affluent can escape, is in necessary tension with the pluralistic nature of American religious commitment and the different paths to virtue that those commitments represent. Employers, too, have found their authority over the moral actions of their employees curtailed by labor statutes or agreements that preclude employers from setting standards for behavior -- after, and even during, work. For example, one of the nation's leading discount stores, Wal-Mart, at one time proclaimed their support for the family in the store handbook by making an extra-marital affair a basis for termination. Several employees so terminated, along with the state attorney general of New York, have sued Wal-Mart, on the theory that the "recreational activities" of employees is none of Wal-Mart's business. But why not? Wal-Mart markets its products with a special emphasis on family, friendliness and assistance. Why should that friendliness and concern stop at helping one locate the aisle with the garden fertilizer, and not include whether employees are being responsible parents and faithful spouses, and thus, virtuous citizens participating in the community Wal-Mart seeks to serve? But schools and employers cannot be reasonably expected to undertake character instruction when more primary moral educators [parents and the church] have been too reticent or intellectually unprepared to articulate the overarching -- or mega-virtues -- upon which the American proposition is founded. If churches fail to make plain the importance of belief in God for a virtuous life, Wal-Mart is no position to pick up the slack. So too, parents that leave children with no workable sense of an objective right and wrong forfeit a duty that is poorly, if ever, rectified in public school or elsewhere. It may be possible to pin some of this failing by the clergy or us as parents on our own distorted national or generalized perspective. But if we are honest, moral failings in our children often reflect insufficient or incomplete moral formation in ourselves. When the personal cardinal virtues of justice, temperance, courage and prudence are unknown, little understood, or understood only abstractly, we are at a loss for words to speak with our children even as we may "feel" we know what actions are right or wrong. We must do more than wallow in cultural anxiety or aggravate cultural war. A re-awakening of virtue through the American family can bring needed cultural cease-fire. The prospects for this often exist just beneath the surface. For example, a 1991 survey found that two-thirds of Americans believe "there is no such thing as absolute truth." Yet, other surveys reveal that Americans overwhelmingly want their president to have an exemplary public and private life, suggesting that when matters become concrete or specific, standards are assumed and insisted upon. As Robert Royal writes: "[i]f the same group had been asked, 'is enslaving or discriminating against another person always wrong?' or 'Should you park in a handicapped space if you're not handicapped?' we might find that most Americans do indeed believe in personal and social absolutes." We can sharpen our focus of these social absolutes, and in the process restore personal and cultural virtue, but again it is up to us -- as parents and as members of church congregations. To slightly paraphrase the poet, Dante: "To a greater force, and to a better nature, we, free, are subject, and that creates the mind in us, which the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore if the present world go astray, the cause is in us, in us it is to be sought." The present world is astray. In our families, we can bring it back."