Restoring Faith, Family and the American Work Ethic

A funny thing happened while we were busy erecting the wall of separation between church and state.  So many vines and weeds grew up around the wall, that it not only caused the wall to crumble, it caused America to crumble.

The warning signs have been out there for over forty years.  In his 1987 book, “The Closing of the American Mind,” Allan Bloom called attention to the decline in moral values, stating the American mind had become closed to the concept of right and wrong.  Pointing to what he called the most important phenomena of our time, he said that “There is now an entirely new language of good and evil.”   He dubbed this new language “value relativism:”

Value relativism can be a great release from the perpetual tyranny of good and evil, with their cargo of shame and guilt, and the endless efforts that the pursuit of the one and the avoidance of the other enjoin … One need not feel bad about or uncomfortable with oneself when just a little value adjustment is necessary.[1]

          The very same year that Bloom’s book was published, Time Magazine’s May 25, 1987 cover story was titled “What Ever Happened to Ethics?”  In that article “pitch” on the magazine cover, Time stated:  “Assaulted by sleaze, scandals and hypocrisy, America searches for its moral bearings.”  

The juxtaposition of these two thoughts – one, that value relativism was doing away with the concepts of good and evil, right and wrong, and the second, that moral and ethical behavior seemed a thing of the past – was striking.  For a host of reasons, from court decisions like Engle vs. Vitale, in which prayer in school was outlawed, to government policies that have weakened the family, America has gone from a society based on Christian principles to a society based on secular principles, and now, a society whose principles are increasingly anti-Christian.  Some see this as a good thing, but let us ask three simple questions: 

A.    If you do not believe in a divine moral law ordained by a Creator, how can you possibly expect people to be ethical, let alone teach ethics?

Without coercion, you can’t.

B.    And, if you can’t expect people to be ethical out of their own volition, how can you expect them to show up for work on time, put in a full day’s work for a full day’s pay, and view a job well done as a calling to which they naturally aspire, rather than see their jobs as tasks they grudgingly do to avoid threats and penalties?

Again, the answer is, you can’t.

C.    Finally, what is the logical outcome over a sustained period of time in which these two trends grow and take hold in the behavior of the American People? 

The answer is, you will have a society in which fewer and fewer people see the value in working hard for the sake of working hard, being willing to create jobs that employ others – and a society in which more and more people who have come to see the coercion of people as a means to get the results one wants.  This growing class of people will, in turn, expect – nay, demand – that someone (i.e. “the rich”) be forced to take care of them.

And at that point, America will ask the same question posed in Psalm 11:3:  If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?

The Three Pillars of a 2020 Vision for Faith, Family and Work

Therefore, the Republican Presidential candidate for 2012 must have 2020 vision to see clearly the connection between the teaching of ethics, the belief in a sovereign God, and a society that seeks to grow and prosper socially and economically.  He or she must understand the need to restore the moral underpinnings of our country and that if we are not one nation, under God, then we will splinter into a hodgepodge of diverse, disunified states, and cease to be a great power.  These moral underpinnings are built upon a foundation of three pillars:

1.      A belief in Almighty God

2.     The cherishment of the traditional family unit, bound in marriage, between one man and one woman.

3.     The instillation of the work ethic in the hearts and minds of our people such that work, for its own sake, is a virtuous endeavor.

1.   A Belief in Almighty God

          In 1991, George Will wrote an op-ed piece titled “A Moral Environment for the Poor”.  In that editorial, Will stated:

The crumbling …of [New York City] is stirring complaints … and longings for a man on horseback, some savior riding to the rescue, wielding power like a sword. New York, like many other cities, needs a man on horseback, but not of that sort.  It needs John Wesley.[2]

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Protestant denomination, said Will, “rode Britain’s rural roads and city streets, evangelized the underclass, exhorting pride and combating family disintegration by reforming behavior.”  Then, as now, people have always understood that if there is no God, everything is permitted. 

          When I was in first and second grade, a woman would come each week to teach a Bible lesson.  I enjoyed those weekly lessons.  When I was in third grade, she didn’t come any more.  One day, while walking out of the grocery store with my mother, I saw the lady, and I asked her why she no longer came to school.  While I don’t remember what she said, I will always remember that crushed, forlorn look on her face.  How do you tell a 9 year old that the U.S. Supreme Court, through its 1962 decision in Engle v. Vitale, has decided that state sanctioned prayer in school is unconstitutional? 

       Over the years, this ruling has been expanded.  In the 2000 Supreme Court ruling in Santa Fe (Texas) Independent School District (SFISD), Petitioner v. Doe, Jane, etc., et al., the Court declared a student, selected by the student body, saying a prayer before a sporting event, was unconstitutional because it could be used as a tool to proselytize those who might not wish to be proselytized.  That ruling has created a great deal of uncertainty over student led prayer at high school graduations, and emboldened efforts to have the words “In God We Trust” removed from the money, and “Under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.

          Another thing that these rulings have done has been to provide a green light to other forms of indoctrination.  As evidence of this statement, consider the May 12, 2011 edition of the online magazine, Queerty.com.  In an article titled “Can We Please Just Start Admitting That We Do Actually Want To Indoctrinate Kids?” the magazine editors wrote:

They accuse us of exploiting children and in response we say, "NOOO! We're not gonna make kids learn about homosexuality, we swear! It's not like we're trying to recruit your children or anything." But let's face it-that's a lie. We want educators to teach future generations of children to accept queer sexuality. In fact, our very future depends on it.  . . . I and a lot of other people want to indoctrinate, recruit, teach, and expose children to queer sexuality AND THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT.[3]

       It is time that America reclaimed the values that made Western civilization great.  Our rights proceed from a Creator, not a Bureaucrat.  Those rights include life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  They also include the freedom to worship the Creator who granted us those rights, not a State that allows us the privilege of believing and saying only those things it deems politically correct.  It is time that we wake up to the realization that we have redefined the pursuit of happiness to mean what once was recognized as an indulgence in debauchery, and that as we exercise our freedom to pursue evil, not good, we enslave ourselves to our passions.  As Alexander Solzhenitsyn once wrote, we have increasingly sought “a total emancipation from the moral heritage of the Christian centuries with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice” so that now, our “sense of responsibility to God and Society has grown dimmer and dimmer.”[4]  

2.  Cherishment of the Traditional Family

            The May 29, 2011 issue of the Indianapolis Star ran the following story on page A6:

MARRIEDS ARE NOW A MINORITY:  Census Says More Households Helmed by Singles and Cohabiters.  “In the 2010 Census, married couples represent 48 percent of all households.  That’s down from 52 percent in the last Census.”

          Social scientists have seen this coming for years.  In a November, 2006 study published by the Urban Institute under contract for the US Department of Labor titled:  Futurework: Trends and Challenges for Work in the 21^st Century, authors Robert Lerman and Stefanie Schmidt reported that: “The rising divorce rate and the growing prevalence  of children born to unmarried mothers means that many children live in single-parent families.” [5]  Today, these numbers are escalating even further. 

          Instead of continually creating programs to reduce the stress of being a single (usually female) parent, lawmakers should take to heart what the authors of Futurework stated; that programs “such as flexible time, parental leave, and dependent care assistance, have little impact on parental stress.”  Instead, lawmakers, and certainly the Republican Presidential Candidate for 2012, must focus on policies that strengthen traditional marriage between a man and a woman.

          Consider the trend in US society which has been the rise of “No Fault Divorce” laws, in which either spouse may file for divorce on the grounds of “irreconcilable differences.”  In a 2010 statistical study, researcher Malcom Gold finds that the effects of divorce reform, though not immediate, do have an impact over time.  In looking at states which have no fault divorce and allow divorce based on a unilateral request by one spouse, he makes this statement:[6]

These statistically significant estimates indicate that divorce reform has impacted the marriage market and not only the stock of married people at the time of reform, changing the frequency of divorce in the long-term. The No-Fault Unilateral point estimate indicates a 75% increase in the divorce rate after 15 years as a result of the simultaneous adoption of no-fault and unilateral divorce.

The issue of marriages does not simply concern itself with the “self actualization” of a man or woman seeking to fulfill their personal desires.  The consequences of the death of marriage are most dramatic in the lives of children born outside of marriage.  In the graph below, we see that the percentage of children born out of wedlock has skyrocketed from 6.8 percent in 1964 to 40.6 percent in 2008.[7] 

Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, in his September, 2010 article titled “Marriage: America’s Greatest Weapon Against Childhood Poverty,” points out that as fathers have disappeared from the home, single moms are left to raise children – often in poverty.  He writes:[8]

The rise in out-of-wedlock childbearing and the increase in single parenthood are major causes of high levels of child poverty. Since the early 1960s, single-parent families have roughly tripled as a share of all families with children. As noted, in the U.S. in 2008, single parents were six times more likely to be poor than were married couples.

In an April 4, 2011 speech titled “The State of White America,”[9]  noted author and social policy researcher Charles Murray addressed the trends affecting American families.  Because some have in the past accused him of racism and condemning non-white minorities, Murray’s speech focused on trends in families for White America only.  Murray focused his analysis on non-Hispanic whites ages 30-49, comparing the top 20% of families as measured by income (what he calls the upper middle class) to working class whites whose income puts them in the bottom 30% of income earners.  Using census data, he compares the years 1960 and 2010 for these two groups of people.

Table One:  Comparison of Key Trends Among Whites, 1960 and 2010

Murray first made a name for himself with his book, Losing Ground: Social Welfare Policy, 1950 to 1980.  In that book, he demonstrated how payments to poor women under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) actually created a financial incentive to get divorced in order to qualify for welfare benefits, and then to never get married.  Under the AFDC program and its controversial “man in the house rule,” poor women could only receive welfare payments IF there was no “man in the house.”  Instituted in the mid 1960s, at first, this meant getting divorced to qualify for aid.  But over time, it led to women not getting married in the first place. 

The ability to get divorced to qualify for government assistance was further enhanced in 1969, when California enacted the Family Law Act of 1969, becoming the first state in the nation to allow “no fault” divorces.  By 1983, 48 of the 50 states had adopted no fault divorce laws.  Combined with the effects of the Man in the House Rule, divorces skyrocketed.[10]

In the accompanying chart, the number of children in divorces peaked in 1980 – but not because the divorce rate fell.  Over this time period, fewer people were getting married.  By 1990, 26 percent of children were being born to single mothers.  In fact, single motherhood was being glorified in Hollywood, leading to the famous interchange between Vice President Dan Quayle and the T.V. character Murphy Brown, when Vice President Quayle attacked a poverty of values that glorified unwed motherhood.  He said:[11]  

Ultimately however, marriage is a moral issue that requires cultural consensus, and the use of social sanctions. Bearing babies irresponsibly is, simply, wrong. Failing to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this.  It doesn't help matters when prime time TV has Murphy Brown - a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional woman - mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another "lifestyle choice."

It is time that we as a nation recognize that being married, especially when children are involved, is the best social program there is.  No family is perfect, but a mom and a dad are better than a case worker and a politician.  We applaud programs that discourage youth from dropping out of schools, yet fail to promote the one thing that will help the most:  Maintain and strengthen heterosexual marriages, and delay childbearing until they are married and economically stable. 

America needs a President with 2020 Vision who is not afraid to proclaim this message.

3.  Support of the Work Ethic

Increasingly, employers are worrying about how they will replace valuable, experienced workers as the Baby Boom generation retires.  They recognize that a “brain drain” is beginning to develop, as members of “Generation Y” enter the workforce, yet lack the math, communication and work ethic skills of the Boomer generation after emerging from a childhood where they weren’t allowed to compete for fear of hurting the losing person’s self esteem.  One observer of this trend noted:[12] 

With almost every company expecting to lose a portion of their employee base through retirements, competition among employers is likely to heat up, making talented, and therefore desirable, workers more difficult to recruit and retain and more expensive due to the increased need for their skills. … As Generations X and Y — the ’replacement workers’ — move into the positions vacated by the Boomers, the odds that these new workers will be able to function at the same level as their experienced and knowledgeable predecessors are very low, and succession planning therefore becomes a critical concern.

How does one deal with this issue?  One way is to impress upon the Boomer generation the need to volunteer, mentor and coach younger people as they transition into the workforce.  Many in the Boomer generation have come to recognize this as a calling, and are responding.  The next President of the United States can tap into this resevior of commitment and dedication to encourage volunteerism to help retrain and retool younger Americans to overcome the challenges of an educational system that has failed to educate their children and grandchildren in the Four Rs:  Reading, ‘Riting, ‘Rithmatic, and Reasoning.

We have created an Americorps for young people to volunteer across America.  As a father whose youngest soon has served two tours with the Americorps progam, helping to rebuild New Orleans after Katrina, built houses in Main with Habitat for Humanity, and constructed trails in Wisconsin, I know how it not only helps people across the country, but molds the character of the young people who enroll in the program.  We need an equivalent program for aging Boomers that can leverage their energy, passion and commitment to restore America to retrain and re-energize Generation Y.

Standing Firm Against the Gathering STORM

At the beginning of this essay, I asked what effect the natural consequence of the first two trends that we’ve discussed would have on the work ethic (those two trends being a decline in a belief in The Creator, and a decline in the institution of marriage and the traditional family).  I proposed the following consequence: 

The answer is, you will have a society in which fewer and fewer people see the value in working hard for the sake of working hard, being willing to create jobs that employ others – and a society in which more and more people who have come to see that coercion of people to get the results one wants - works.  This growing class of people will, in turn, expect – nay, demand – that someone (i.e. “the rich”) be forced to take care of them.

While the politically correct don’t want to admit that this is the natural outcome of these trends, it isn’t ignored on the human resource literature.  In their Futurework study, Robert Lerman and Stefanie Schmidt stated:[13]

Changing marital and living arrangements could have significant implications for the workforce. Labor force participation rates are much higher and unemployment rates much lower among married than among unmarried men and women. Even in today's tight job market (1998:1), unemployment rates are high among individuals who are in the never-married category. Never-married men experienced an 8.2 percent unemployment rate, far above the 2.1 percent rate among men who are married and living with a spouse. In addition, labor market outcomes are better among men living with at least one of their own children than among men with no children. The unemployment rate of never-married men is only 5.7 percent among those with children, but over 8 percent among those without children. Projections indicate that the share of American households consisting of families with children will decline from 48 percent to about 41 percent and that married-couple families with children will make up less than one-third of families by 2010. To some extent, it is changes in employment opportunities that cause changes in marriage and family formation patterns and not the other way around. However, some of the marital and family changes have other causes and may well lead to worse job market outcomes. (emphasis added)

This disconnect is further identified in Charles Murray’s more recent work.  As I demonstrated in Table One above, white men looking for work in 1960, be they rich or poor, were nearly equal.  Murray noted that 1.5% of white men in the top 20% of earners were unemployed, compared to 2% among the bottom 30%.  By 2010, while 5% of white men were unemployed in the top 20%, fully 12% of white men were unemployed among the bottom 30%.  Conversely, marriage rates among the more wealthy white men had barely changed.  But, among the lower income white men, marriage rates had plummeted from 83% in 1960 to 48% in 2010.

          Some use this set of facts to push for more money for the poor, rather than rebuilding the moral fabric whose decay has led us to the state of affairs we are in.  Indeed, some are advocating revolution as a solution.  But encouraging revolution as a solution to the problem is the inevitable consequence of people seeing that coercion, rather than virtue, is the key to prosperity.  Increasingly, elements in the United States are advocating revolution along Marxian lines, such as a group called STORM.  Their manifesto can be found at http://www.leftspot.com/blog/files/docs/STORMSummation.pdf . 

On page 34 of their document, they discuss a “Culture and Propaganda Work Group” which has 4 goals:[14]

1.      To nurture new revolutionary art and artists

2.      To produce street level agitation and propaganda

3.      To bring cultural workers into political action; and

4.      To build networks among revolutionary cultural workers.

This is not to excuse the excesses of the rich.  Clearly, there are excesses that our moral decline tends to exacerbate.  Be it Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who doesn’t pay his taxes at the same time he heads the IRS; Representative Charles Rangel who headed the tax writing committee of the House of Representatives (Ways and Means) while cheating on his taxes; Congressman Anthony Weiner, who authors anti-pornography legislation while tweeting lewd pictures of himself to a number of women; or an equal number of Republicans who have done similar things, these actions are  WRONG and perpetrators should be called to resign.  YES, the words wrong, sin, and evil need to be re-introduced into our conversations.  It is time to repair the damage caused that America to “close its mind” to the idea that such actions are evil, to paraphrase Allan Bloom.

          But what trends like the wealthy taking advantage of their positions for personal gain, and the efforts to incite Marxian revolution both do, is to draw us away from the solutions that will truly work. 

We will not regain the greatness of America by taking from those we believe have somehow wronged us.  For, as James Madison warned in Federalist Paper 51, such a strategy leads to a creation of groups like STORM, who then stir the people to demand “that some power altogether independent of the people would soon be called for by the voice of the very factions whose misrule had proved the necessity of it.”

It is time we as a nation recognize that encouraging work for its own sake, that encouraging a sense of pride in a job well done, and a desire to stand on one’s own two feet are needed if we are to regain the economic greatness of America. 

In summary, then, faith, family and a return to the American work ethic are the watch words that social conservatives are looking for in the next President of the United States.  These are the solutions we need, not revolution and the resulting despotism such ideologues from groups like STORM and their ilk preach as a form of panacea. 

America needs a President with 2020 Vision who is not afraid to proclaim this message.