There is no doubt that today, the United State of America is the most powerful nation in the world. As we prepare to enter the new millennium, America leads the way technologically, and the American economy is the strongest economy in the world.

Yet at the same time our nation is faced by severe problems. Our social fabric seems to be coming apart at the seams. Every day we are confronted by reports of violent crime, teen suicide, drug abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse, teen suicide. In the past year we have been shocked by incidents which would have previously been considered unimaginable - teen parents casting their new born babies into dumpsters, an 11 and 14 year-old laying in ambush to kill their teachers and students at a school in Arkansas, and now most recently, a 15 year-old in Oregon slaying his parents and then opening fire on his fellow classmates in the high school cafeteria.

Of particular concern for us in this conference is the increasing disintegration of stable, loving families in our society. The following are some facts gathered by Dr. Tyler Hendicks of the True Family Values Institute:

From 1901 to 1970, the divorce rate increased by 700%. In 1900 there were 56,000 divorces in America; in 1992 1.2 million, a 700% increase, adjusted for population growth (Insight 6/17/96, p. 14)

From 1970 to 1992, the divorce rate increased 279%; the number of children with a divorced parent increased 352%, the cohabitation population increased 533%, which means 2.7 million unmarried households, 40% of them containing children. (Stanton, pp. 2-3)

Within six months of their marriage, 50% of newlyweds begin to doubt the marriage will last, 39% report "big fights" at least once a week and 4% had already separated for at least one night. (Philadelphia Inquirer, 1994)

"Between 1970 and 1995, . . . the percentage of married couples with children dropped by a third, but single-parent families nearly doubled." (Larry Witham, "New data on American family offer few hopeful signs," WT National Edition, March 11-17, 1996, p. 1)

In 1960, 243,000 children were living with a single parent who had never married; by 1993 this figure had risen to 6.3 million.

1.2 million children per year are born into fatherless homes. America has 1.8 million "latchkey" kids. (Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, p. 118)

20 years ago, 17% of American children grow up without a father; today, 36% do.

In 1960, 8 million children living only with their mother; in 1995, 23 million.

Three fastest growing forms of the family in the US, 1980-95: 1. Single mother families; 2. Blended families (step-parents); 3. Divorced families (the family left over after divorce). (Stanton, p. 1)

Furthermore, research has now established a clear link between the breakdown of the family and the major problems plaguing our society. Consider the following facts:

Divorce is the leading cause of childhood depression. (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development)

75% of adolescent patients at chemical abuse centers are from single-parent families. (Center for Disease Control, Atlanta, GA)

63% of youth suicides are single-parent children. (Center for Disease Control, Atlanta, GA)

70% of teen-age pregnancies are single-parent children. ("Children in Need: Investment Strategies for the Educationally Disadvantaged" - Committee for Economic Development )

75% of juveniles in youth correction facilities are from single-parent families. (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1988)

Children of divorce are 5 times more likely to be suspended from school; 3 times as likely to need psychological counseling; 2 times as likely to repeat a grade; are absent from school more, late to school more often; show more health problems.( . Dr. Gene Brody - Study of Competence in Children and Families; Gormely, Newburgh, NY)

Judith S. Wallerstein, in "Children After Divorce: Wounds That Don't Heal" in Perspectives on Marriage reports her findings that:

Twelve to eighteen months after the divorce "we found family after family still in crisis, their wounds wide open. Their symptoms were worse than they had been immediately after the divorce." After 5 years, 37% of the children had gone downhill: "It would be hard to find any other group of children - except, perhaps, the victims of a natural disaster - who suffered such a rate of sudden serious psychological problems." After 10 years, 41% of the children of divorce were "worried, underachieving, self-depreciating and sometimes angry young men and women." By ages 19-23, 66% of the female children of divorce found that they were more haunted and scarred by the divorce in their earlier lives than either they or the researchers had realized. 40% of the boys were found to be floundering in their lives. "divorce was the single most important cause of enduring pain and anomie in their lives. The young people told us time and again how much they needed a family structure, how much they wanted to be protected, and how much they yearned for clear guideline for moral behavior. An alarming number of teen-agers felt abandoned, physically and emotionally.

Dr. Patrick Fagan, a family therapist and former deputy assistant secretary of Health and Human Services who is currently serving as William H. G. FitzGerald Fellow in family issues at The Heritage Foundation has done extensive research on the causes of crime in America.

In brief, Dr. Fagan’s conclusion is:

The root cause of violent crime thus is found in failed intimate relationships of love in marriage and in the family. The breakdown of stable communities … flows directly from this failure. In contrast, addressing the root causes … requires an understanding of the crucial elements of supportive family and community life.

First in importance and influence is the basic marriage commitment. Its vital importance is starkly evident in the catastrophic impact of its absence.

Second is the relationship of love between parents and children, a love expressed primarily in supervision.

Third, stemming from the first and second, is the child's ability to relate to other children.

Fourth, the backbone of strong neighborhoods, is friendship and cooperation between families.

(The Real Root Causes of Violent Crime: the Breakdown of Marriage, Family, and Community by Patrick Fagan, The Heritage Foundation)

Dr. Fagan also notes the positive effect of religious faith and practice on morals, character and the formation of strong families and offers this advice:

It is no coincidence that one of the central rules in the traditional moral codes of all communities at all times, in all places, and in all cultures is the prohibition against giving birth to children outside of marriage. Societies all over the world have recognized that this prohibition is essential to social stability and to raising members of each new generation with the proper respect for their community and their peers. Unfortunately, and with disastrous consequences, this prohibition is ignored today in American society at all levels …

Whenever there is too high a concentration of such broken families in any community, that community will disintegrate. Only so many dysfunctional families can be sustained before the moral and social fabric of the community itself breaks down. Re-establishment of the basic community code of children within marriage is necessary both for the future happiness of American families and for a reduction in violent crime.

(The Real Root Causes of Violent Crime: the Breakdown of Marriage, Family, and Community by Patrick Fagan, The Heritage Foundation)

America has developed a schizophrenic culture. On the one hand, we have attained unprecedented heights of material success and prosperity On the other hand, we have been unable to maintain a solid moral character, family stability, safe communities, and a harmonious and happy society. This contradiction is manifest in individual lives. We instill in our youth a strong desire for material success and prosperity yet we fail to teach the values that are necessary to build good character, strong families, and a harmonious society.

The moral compass of our society, the conscience, has been corrupted and a vicious cycle is being generated. Children born and raised in dysfunctional families in which they do not receive the love of parents necessary to instill the sense of value, empathy for others, self-discipline, and good character necessary for a healthy society are less likely to form lasting intimate relationships which develop into committed marriages and stable families. As this cycle expands, society’s problems multiply. If we are to renew American society, it is imperative that we break the cycle of family breakdown. In order to do this however, it is necessary to understand more about the cultural climate of 20th century America and to identify certain ideas which have suborned and weakened the power of the conscience in today’s society.

Ideas have consequences. People act the way that they do because they think in certain ways, because they hold certain beliefs. This is true for individuals and it is also true for a society or culture. In the modern world, certain institutions - the universities, schools, the media and the entertainment industry - have a major influence in shaping our understanding of ourselves and the world. The ideas and images which are communicated not only influence the actions of individuals; they have a profound influence on public policy which in turn further affects our life and our decisions.

Truth is truth. Ideally truth discovered by science and reason should be in agreement with truth revealed by religion and work in harmony to help create a healthy society in a prosperous and productive environment. In practice, however, this has not often been the case. A later lecture will contain a more full discussion of the development and relationship between secular thought, tracing it’s antecedents back to the Greek Hellenism, and sacred thought, which in our tradition have been based primarily upon the Bible.

In this short presentation, there is not time to explore the tremendous social changes that have occurred in the past several hundred years and the complex interplay of secular and religious thought. For our purposes, I will simply say that building on the thought of the Enlightenment and inspired by the rapid development of science, many thinkers in the 19th century rejected the authenticity of divine revelation and called into question basic principles of Judeo-Christian culture. Based upon 19th century conceptions of science, a number of thinkers with a secular bias sought to develop a modern scientific conception of man and the universe. In the process of this development, several ideas were expounded which have contributed to modern man’s separation from God, and confused our comprehension of basic moral truths. As these ideas have been propagated, people’s consciences have been weakened, and this has helped to create a climate in which the breakdown of the family has been occurring. I would like to pinpoint a number of these ideas and trace their development through some of our major institutions.

The following ideas in combination have been particularly harmful:

God, religion, and questions of morality are matters of personal opinion which have little or no relevance to social problems.

Man is a highly evolved animal.

There are no absolute standards; values are relative.

The nuclear family is a product of social evolution and is just one of a number of possible forms of social organization.

Societies problems can be solved by technology and the social sciences with a particular emphasis on the role of the state in social engineering.

This is in contrast to Judeo-Christian beliefs as well as other traditional cultures which have asserted that:

There is a God

Man is a spiritual being who depends upon a relationship with the divine to discover and fulfill his purpose in life

There are universal and absolute moral principles

The nuclear family is not only the central foundation for the transmission of social values but is a sacred institution protected by very clear standards of sexual morality.

In the following remarks, I look at several thinkers who have had a profound influence on the 20th century. Let me clarify that I am not attacking them personally, I am not pretending to give a systematic presentation of their philosophy, and I am not saying that they that they were evil or totally wrong in all of their views. What I would like to do is look at the impact that some of their ideas had - how those ideas have been popularly received by the culture - and how they contributed to and gave currency to the notions mentioned above.

Auguste Comte who lived in France from 1798 to 1857 was the father of Positivism and the founder of the Sociology. Positivism maintains that the only way that verifiable truth can be ascertained is through the empirical methods of science. Because statements of a religious, moral or metaphysical nature can not be verified, they are not objective truths. Though they may have emotional value, they are opinion rather than scientific truth. Comte proposed that scientific methods should be used to study society and human behavior and for this purpose he founded sociology. The founding of sociology was followed by the establishment of several other disciplines of social science such as anthropology, psychology, political science, and the development of social statistics. The principles of positivism also influenced the study of history, law, and philosophy. In fact, the social sciences played a major role in the development of the 20th century university. As the university became the central institution for training the leadership of modern America, the social sciences with their positivistic bias became the wellspring of the progressive movement and the modern liberal state. The army of bureaucrats who man numerous administrative agencies of the modern state are evidence of the legacy of positivism. For you legislators, the next time a representative of a government agency testifies before your committee with a barrage of social statistics, say a little thank you to Auguste.

The publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 was a second milestone in the development of the modernist viewpoint. Darwin’s theory that evolution takes place through a process of natural selection based upon random genetic mutations not only suggested that man is merely a physical animal. His emphasis on the random nature of genetic mutation implies that there is no inherent order to the universe and no creative design. If evolution is determined by chance, then some other form of life could just as easily have developed to a position of ascendancy. Science can explain the ascent of man better than religion. There is no need for belief in God to explain man’s existence. Indeed, God, morality, and religion each can be viewed as mere creations of the human mind. As man’s brain evolved to the point that he developed intelligence and the capability of abstract thought, man created religion in his attempt to explain natural phenomena. God didn’t create man; man created God.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written by Friedrich Nietzsche between 1883 and 1885, Zarathustra proclaims

Before God! But now this god has died. You higher men, this god was your greatest danger. It is only since he lies in his tomb that you have been resurrected. Only now the great noon comes; only now the higher man becomes lord.

Have you understood this word. O my brothers? You are startled? Do your hearts become giddy? Does the abyss yawn before you? Does the hellhound howl at you? Well then you higher men! Only now is the mountain of man’s future in labor. God died: now we want the overman to live. (translation by Walter Kaufman)

Nietzsche was announcing the demise of traditional values and moral restraints of Christian society and the potential for powerful creative individuals to create their own values freed from the restraints of "the morality of the herd." As Alan Bloom states in his book Closing the American Mind:

Values are not discovered by reason, and it is useless to seek them, to find the truth or the good life. The quest begun by Odysseus and continued for over three thousand millennia has come to an end with the observation that there is nothing to seek. This alleged fact was announced by Nietzsche just over a century ago when he said, "God is dead." Good and evil now appear for the first time as values, of which there have been a thousand and one, none rationally or objectively preferable to one another. (p. 143)

Once man is deprived man of a standard of value based on faith in divine revelation, reason itself is incapable of defining any absolute standard of value. Bloom describes in his book how the concept of relative values became extremely influential in American universities after World War II.

In his clinical work with women suffering from hysteria, Sigmund Freud discovered that sexual frustration seemed to be the common cause of their neuroses. In time, Freud developed a theory of personality emphasizing the determining power of unconscious sexual drives. The central principle of the personality is the pleasure principle. The unconscious id or libido is the dominant factor in the human psyche and its strongest impulse is the desire for sexual gratification. The ego, or consciousness is the rational faculty which seeks to adapt the needs of the id to its environment. The superego, which we would generally identify as the conscience, is the composite of parental taboos and rewards which are imbedded in our in our formative years. In the case of Western civilization, the monogamous family as a social institution is a culturally derived attempt of a patriarchal society to control sexuality. Strict monogamy can cause sexual repression and thus give rise to individual and social neuroses. Religion itself is a creation of the unconscious mind, an "illusion", similar to a neuroses, which is generated by the unconscious to reinforce the predominant social mores. In other words, a patriarchal society creates a Father God to replace the father figure of childhood and maintain the control of the superego.

Here is a representative quote form one of Freud’s later and most widely read works:

The tendency on the part of civilization to restrict sexual life is no less clear than its tendency to expand the cultural unit. Its first, totemic, phase already brings with it the prohibition against an incestuous choice of object, and this is perhaps the most drastic mutilation which man’s erotic life has in all time experienced. Taboos, laws, customs impose further restrictions, which affect both men and women. Not all civilizations go equally far in this; and the economic structure of the society also influences the amount of sexual freedom that remains…. A high-water mark has been reached in our Western Civilization…. As regards the sexually mature individual, the choice of an object is restricted to the opposite sex, and most extra-genital satisfactions are forbidden as perversions. The requirement, demonstrated in these prohibitions, that there be a single kind of sex life for everyone, disregards the dissimilarities, whether innate or acquired, in the sexual constitution of human beings. It cuts off a fair number of them from sexual enjoyment, and so becomes a source of serious injustice. (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930)

As Freud’s ideas gained popularity they gave rise to the notion that sexual repression is unhealthy and that morality is artificial. Such notions are at the root of the sexual revolution of the 1960’s, the sexual liberation movements as well as many of the ideas which determine the bias of sex education and school policy to this day. In a more general sense the pervasive influence of the popular concepts of Freud created a general climate in which it is easy for anyone to rationalize the immorality and infidelity which lead to teen pregnancy, and family breakdown.

Now I would like to take a brief look at how these "modern" ideas have influenced the major institutions of 20th century America and have helped to create a moral and cultural climate which has contributed to the breakdown of the family in the last three decades of this century.

The university has come to play a central role in 20th century America. Our teachers, our journalists, our policy makers, our lawyers, our writers, and our bureaucrats are all university educated. As emphasized earlier, the 20th century university has emphasized a scientific, empirical approach not only in the hard sciences but in the social sciences as well. University education has embraced the secular ideas of modernism. Whereas, in the 18th and 19th century our most important universities were founded initially as seminaries and theology was seen as the queen of the sciences, gradually the situation changed and the sciences and the social sciences became dominant with government funding for social and scientific research. University students learned to view the universe through a modernist viewpoint emphasizing relative values and man’s secular nature. Needless to say such ideas influenced their personal morality. Moreover, graduates have carried these ideas with them into their work in education, media, and public policy.

John Dewey had a long career extending from the last decade of the 19th century through the first half of the 20th. According to John Westbrook, author of John Dewey and American Democracy:

The consensus of opinion, including that of those critical of Dewey’s social philosophy, is that he was a major influence on the ideology of modern liberalism and that Deweyan pragmatism is the most articulate expression of the philosophical foundation of this ideology, an ideology that has dominated political and social intercourse in twentieth-century America.

Dewey was especially influential in the field of education. As chairman of the department of philosophy, psychology and education at the University of Chicago from 1894 to 1904, he helped to found the famous Dewey School, a laboratory school designed to test and develop his psychological and educational theories. In 1904 he went to Columbia University where remained until his retirement in 1930. The Columbia Teachers College trained teachers for the United States and schools around the world and Dewey’s philosophy had a major impact on education. Expressing his pedagogic creed in 1897, Dewey declared: "I believe… the teacher is engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life… that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth."

Says Westbrook:

Dewey’s conviction … reflected his belief that "education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform." There is a certain logic to this belief. Insofar as schools played an important part in the shaping of the character of a society’s children, they could if they were designed to do so, fundamentally transform the society. The school provided a relatively controlled environment in which the conditions of self-development could effectively shape its course. Indeed, if teachers did their job well, there would hardly be need of any other sort of reform. (John Dewey and American Democracy, p. 109)

Inspired and guided by this mission, American public education in the 20th century became the vehicle for implementing and testing the latest social theories out of the secular academic world.

The legal system has also been impacted. Not only has our legislative and administrative policy been heavily influenced by secular, relativistic ideas; moreover, judges have gradually assumed the role of policy makers influenced by modern social theory.

Legal positivism was introduced into American legal thought by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935). Holmes taught law at Harvard, served as editor of the American Law review, and Associate Justice and Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. In 1902 he was appointed by Theodore Roosevelt to the Supreme Court where he served for almost thirty years. Holmes was extremely active in late 19th century debates concerning the nature of the law.

In 1894, he published The Path of the Law. In this book Holmes analyzed the debate concerning law and moral principles in terms of his "prediction theory." Declared Holmes, " the prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law." In defining the criteria for judicial decision-making, Holmes downplayed legal principle and history and expressed his hope that in the future, "we will spend more energy on a study of the ends to be attained and the reasons for desiring them."

"For the rational study of law," stated Holmes, " the black letter man may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics."

In evaluating the impact of this book, Morton J. Horwitz, a leading legal historian stated:

With the "Path of the Law" Holmes pushed American legal thought into the twentieth century. It is the moment at which advanced legal thinkers renounced the belief in a conception of legal thought independent of politics and separate from social reality. From this moment on, the late-nineteenth-century ideal of an internally self-consistent and autonomous system of legal ideals, free from the corrupting influence of politics, was brought constantly under attack. …

It is at this moment that the idea that law is discovered and not made was dealt its most powerful blow in American thought. Only a short time later, Charles Beard extended these demystifying premises to the constitution itself. The result was an intellectual alliance between social reform and a view of law as socially created. Those Progressive writers during the decade before World War I who elaborated a "social engineering’ view of law would come to treat "The Path of the Law" as inspired text. (The Transformation of American Law: 1870-1960, p. 142)

HoImes had defined an incredible amount of power that judges wielded in deciding cases and shaping social policy. In practice, after he was named to the Supreme Court where he served for several decades, Holmes was careful not to abuse that power and paid close attention to legislative intent. However, subsequent judges were less reticent and from the 1930’s through the 1970’s we saw the growth of schools of thought such as legal realism and judicial activism in which judges increasingly came to see their role as arbitrators of social policy, and their ideas of social policy were based directly upon modernist secular ideas.

Likewise, the past generation of journalists in both electronic and print media has come to define a role for themselves as shapers of policy as much as seeking to objectively report fact. Even when not engaging in "advocacy journalism," news coverage has been influenced by a secular, relativist viewpoint. This has been documented in numerous studies of members of the media. The entertainment industry, including novels, music, and the film industry, has likewise popularized the ideas of relativism, secularism, sexual freedom, and alternative lifestyles helping to make these ideas pervasive in our culture.

Finally, as mass marketing developed, Madison Avenue embraced Freud’s theory of sexuality as a means of selling products. "Sex sells" has become a universal maxim, and Americans have been bombarded by millions of sexually suggestive images.

What has been the result of these developments on American culture. Our children grow up in secular schools in which they learn that values are relative, they are animals, and they can not be expected to control their sexual desires. We give them condoms and wish them good luck. They go on to university, where freed from parental restraint they are further reinforced in these ideas. Our perception of the world through the media is filtered through a secular relativistic viewpoint and we are bombarded by advertising and the entertainment media with a sympathetic viewing of permissive attitudes and alternative lifestyles. The values of modernism, generated in the 19th century, gaining popularity with the intelligentsia in the early part of this century, and bore fruit in the 1960’s and 70’s. The sexual revolution of the 1960’s was a direct attack on traditional notions of morality, marriage, and family. A generation later, we are realizing the devastating effects of that assault in the myriad social problems of today.

In this climate is it any wonder that young people feel justified in engaging in premarital sex. Is it any wonder that millions of couples can rationalize breaking their marriage vows? In a culture which emphasizes gratification over self-control and morality is viewed as a matter of personal opinion, is it any wonder that families are breaking down and domestic violence and crime are on the rise.

There is no doubt that the science has provided incredible benefits for mankind. Transportation and communications are bringing the world together. Technology has created a wealth of material comforts. But what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but loses his soul. The social sciences in their turn have provided us with a vast amount of information and insight into human nature and valuable techniques with which to study the economy, society, and even the human mind. Yet at the same time the flawed secular and relativist bias of modern secularism has undermined the very principles which are necessary for the maintenance of a stable society. At the root of such flaws are the notions that God either does not exist or is irrelevant to society, that man is nothing more than a highly evolved animal, and that moral values are all relative. The ironic thing is that all of these ideas are based on outdated 19th century notions of science, just as Marxism, which claimed to be "scientific socialism," was in fact not scientific at all. Today, contemporary science is becoming more and more compatible with religious belief, and, as can be seen from the research cited above, the tools of social science are themselves affirming the necessity of traditional moral values.

Harvey Cox, the Harvard theologian who in the 1960’s had written The Secular City, published a new book entitled Fire From Heaven in 1995. The book was the result of several years spent traveling across the United States and to four continents studying the growth of the Pentecostal movement. In his introduction Cox states

Nearly three decades ago I wrote a book, The Secular City, in which I tried to work out a theology for the "postreligious" age that many sociologists had confidently assured us was coming. Since then, however, religion… seems to have gained a new lease on life. Today, it is secularity, not spirituality, that may be headed for extinction….

The prognosticators had written that the technological pace and urban bustle of the twentieth century would increasingly shove religion to the margin where, deprived of roots, it would shrivel…

This did not happen. Instead, before the academic forecasters could even draw their pensions, a religious renaissance is under way all over the globe…. We are definitely in a period of renewed religious vitality, another "great awakening" …with all the promise and peril religious revivals always bring with them, but this time on a world scale.

In the concluding chapter of the book, Dr. Cox states

For the past three centuries, two principle contenders - scientific modernity and traditional religion have clashed over the privilege of being the ultimate source of meaning and value. Now like tired boxers who have slugged away too long, the two have reached an exhausted stalemate. As British rock singer Sting laments in one of his most popular songs, many have now lost faith in "science and progress" and in "the holy church." People are still willing to rely on science for the limited things it has proven it can do, but they no longer believe it will answer their deepest questions. They remain vaguely intrigued with the traditional religions, but not with the conventional churches… But the loss of direction Sting sings about also has a positive side. Increasing numbers of people appear ready to move on, and are looking for a more promising map of the life-world.

To provide such a "life-map" is the challenge that faces us as we approach the new millennium. It is our responsibility to articulate an understanding which affirms the sacred truths revealed in the scriptures at the same time that it embraces the proven and useful principles of science. We need to dispel the fallacies of secularism and empower the conscience of our nation with a clear concept of a healthy society with loving God-centered families as the foundation - a God-centered ideal empowered by a love that transcends race, national origin, denomination, profession, or economic status. If we are to restore the family we must clarify what a true family is, how it is attained, and how it functions in the society. Armed with such an understanding, we can then tackle the task of reversing the destructive social trends which are plaguing our society and work toward the realization of a peaceful and loving society, nation, and world.

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