Democracy in America: A Fading Reality

In 1947, Henry Steele Commager wrote about  Alexis De Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America:

• By common consent, his Democracy in America [1835-40] is the most illuminating commentary on American character and institutions ever penned by a foreigner, the one which a century after its appearance, seems best assured of immortality. (xi)

The world had been looking at the peculiar experiment of American democracy and the great progress associated with it. Tocqueville observed America’s intimate connection with its faith:

• Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention. (200)

• America, one of the freest and most enlightened nations in the world, fulfills all the outward duties of religion with fervor. (200)

However, Tocqueville warned that the American democracy and success could not easily be replicated in another environment:

• This government can only be maintained on certain conditions of intelligence, private morality, and religious faith which we [French] do not possess. (xvi-xii) 

According to Tocqueville, the necessary glue and guidance came from their faith:

• The great austerity of manners which is observable in the United States arises, in the first instance, from religious faith.” (198) 

He called “religion in America” the “foremost of the political institutions.” Tocqueville wasn’t suggesting that Christianity had become the mandated faith. However, he observed that everyone acted in accordance with this faith:

• I do not know whether all the Americans have a sincere faith in their religion, for who can search the human heart? But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizen or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation, and to every rank of society… The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other. (200-201)

Certainly, the U.S. wasn’t legally a Christian nation. However, in character and in practice it was:

• Christianity, therefore, reigns without any obstacle, by universal consent. (199)

How was its Christian character manifested? Tocqueville compared the USA with his France and the bloody, chaotic revolution it had endured in the name of “freedom and equality”:

• No one in the United States has dared to advance the maxim that everything is permissible… an impious adage which seems to have been invented in an age of freedom to shelter all the tyrants of future ages. Thus, while the law permits Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit what is rash and unjust. (200)

For Tocqueville, democracy alone could not deliver the benefits. It had to be underpinned by Christian faith. This hadn’t been the case in France; nor would it be the case in the future genocidal upheavals that had ravaged the Western world. Instead, Tocqueville observed that Christianity had placed necessary limits upon the possible excesses of democracy, especially in regards to the institution of Christian family:

• There is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is so much respected as in America, or where conjugal happiness is more highly or worthily appreciated. In Europe, almost all the disturbances of society arise from the irregularities of domestic life. To despise the natural bonds and legitimate pleasures of home is to contract a taste for excesses, a restlessness of heart, and the evil of fluctuating desires. Agitated by the tumultuous passions which frequently disturb his dwelling, the European is galled by the obedience which the legislative powers of the State exact. But when the American retires from the turmoil of public life to the bosom of his family, he finds in it the image of order and of peace… While the European endeavors to forget his domestic troubles by agitating society, the American derives from his own home that love of order which he afterward carries with him into public affairs. (199)

Meanwhile, the United States is actively engaged in dismantling this very source of peace, throwing out the definition of family and of sexual identity, even forbidding any mention of what had once been the foundations for its peace.

The battle cry of “freedom and equality” and other forms of social agitation, coming from agitated souls, have ironically created the most oppressive forms of dictatorships and resulting human exterminations, namely Communism, National Socialism and other idealistic promises of utopia. God help us!

The Brave New World of Sexual Permissiveness

 

“All we need is love,” but what is love? Today, we tend to equate love with sexual passion. Therefore, if the passion is there, so is love, and who can argue against that, as one 18-year old woman insisted:

• I just don’t understand why I’m judged for being happy. We are two adults who brought each other out of dark places.

This claim came from an interview found in the New York Magazine entitled, “What It’s Like to Date Your Dad.” Actually, this anonymous woman is happily engaged to her Dad. However, relationships often sour. In this case, the woman would stand to lose both husband and Dad in a single stroke. However, she is undeterred:

• He’s promised that if either of us decides the relationship can’t work he still wants to be there as my dad.

Passion can blind reason. In this case, the blindness is colossal! What makes her think that if her Dad rejects her as a wife, he will still be there as Dad!

But I think that there is a bigger issue. What if our society encourages fatherly feelings to slip into sexual feelings? What if this possibility becomes planted in the minds of both children and parents? Will children still be able to regard their parents as pillars of trust and protection or will they see their father hungering after them with the eyes of a sexual predator? Such a change will not only redefine “family,” it will utterly overturn a child’s source of peace and stability and parental responsibility.

Here’s another question. Why did the New York Magazine pursue such a non-judgmental, permissive, feeling-based interview? It almost seems like they want to make any form of sexuality as acceptable and casual as eating apple pie. Why? Can we handle that?

Why Church Attendance has Declined

Why has church attendance declined so drastically in Western Europe?  British writer Kingsley Martin famously boasted that “rationalism has argued the Church out of existence.” However, the stats stubbornly demonstrate the very opposite thing.

Meanwhile, Mary Eberstadt, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C, offers a different explanation:

•  Social science has roundly established that vibrant families and vibrant religion go hand in hand. Conversely, not living in a family means that a given individual is less likely to be found in church. As Wilcox has summarized the data, “The recent history of American religion illuminates what amounts to a sociological law: The fortunes of American religion rise with the fortunes of the intact, married family.” Similarly, the late sociologist Steven L. Nock observed in his 1998 book, Marriage in Men’s Lives, that “changes in the number of children in the married couple’s household have large consequences for men’s church attendance…With each additional child, men increase their attendance at services by 2.5 times per year.”

•  More families and more children, in short, means more God. Similarly, to summarize other statistics, marriage increases the likelihood of belonging to a religious organization—whereas cohabitation, by contrast, has what three researchers have called a “strong, negative effect on the probability of religious activity.” Unmarried people without children are less likely to go to church than are married people, or married people with children. A married man with children, for example, is over twice as likely to go to church as an unmarried man with no children. Once again, where there is more marriage, there is more religion; where there is less.

While children draw families to church, deviant sex also drives many away. The more Westerners have practiced a sexuality that is not accepted by the church, the more they have distanced themselves from the church and affiliate with those who accept their lifestyle.

I have seen this close-up. Several gay friends have distanced themselves from me once they embraced the gay lifestyle, understandably surrounding themselves with those who affirm them. When I had reconnected with one friend after some years, he was astonished with my views. “I didn’t know that people still believed like you!”  He had immersed himself into a community where there were no dissenting opinions.

This same phenomenon pertains to other forms of deviant sexuality. The more indulgence in pornography or adultery, the more we seek a value system or community that will affirm our behavior.

We seek to assuage our conscience. Therefore, we seek to avoid any influence that will make us feel guilty. Consequently, the more that Western values and sexual practice depart from Christian values, the less attractive the church!

We Need Sexual Taboos

Advocates of homosexuality had assured the public that accepting homosexuality would not provide a slippery slope into wholesale sexual deviance. On the other side of the debate, it was argued that this rationale could be used to justify almost anything, and it has – pedophilia, polyamory, and sex-change surgery.

Unsurprisingly, the rationale for the homosexual agenda, as a hard-wired, unchangeable sexual orientation, has quickly expanded into “choice.” Anyone has the right to “love” whomever they want. Consequently, one motherexplains:

• “Vertasha and I knew we were attracted to each other when she was sixteen,” Mary Carter said. “But we decided to wait to have sex until she was eighteen, legally of age. We are now going public with our relationship to help others who might be in gay mother/daughter relationship feel confident and okay about coming out. We want the world to know we love each other as mother and daughter and romantically… we’re not hurting anyone. We’re a new minority and just want acceptance.”

Carter pleads that they “just want acceptance,” and why not? Who wants to be regarded as “haters” or “familio-phobic?” And don’t they have a right to enjoy sexual “love” wherever it might take us by surprise?

There are costs, significant ones. Homosexuals bear tremendous physical, spiritual, and psychological costs. The intra-family costs are even more ghastly. Can a daughter or a son sit on a parents lap without wondering whether or not they are being groomed as a sexual object? Can they wrestle, play, and remain affectionate with their parents (or even siblings) once the taboo is removed, and their school informs them that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with sexual relations with their parents?

The trust arising from our unconditional, “taboo-ridden” parent child relationships is the foundation of family and the minimal condition that children require for a stable and secure childhood. What will happen when the wife can no longer trust the husband to keep his hands off the children? Will not sexual jealousies tear apart the family!

Our progressive society blindly jumps into sexual experimentation because it yields pleasurable but very temporary benefits. It then becomes politically correct and beyond the pale of any serious discussion.

Sex-change surgery is now financed by tax dollars despite the lack of evidential support. In a “review of more than 100 studies,” the University of Birmingham found that “no robust scientific evidence that gender reassignment surgery is clinically effective.” (Salvo, Fall 2014, 33)

Dr. Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital reports on two studies which tracked children claiming to have transgender feelings.

• Among children who received no medical or surgical treatment, 70 to 80 percent spontaneously lost those feelings. (32)

Clearly, the scalpel should not be used to address mental disorders. However, the “right to choose” has become a conversation stopper. If parents want to sex their children, well isn’t it their right, even if they have to wait until their child becomes “legal?”

And why shouldn’t we take seriously the little girl who says she wants to marry “daddy?” We don’t, at least for now. But why shouldn’t we if that’s her orientation! Shouldn’t we honor it?

Vertasha is no less naïve and myopic:

• “My mom is still my mom. She does normal mom stuff: buys me clothes, pays for food, tells me to make our bed. We just happen to enjoy sex with each other too.”

Vertasha assumes that mom will always be mom. However, if other lesbian relationships are any indication of their future, the inevitable challenges presented by jealousy, bitterness, guilt, and the many other forms of disappointment will bred alienation, and mom will be history along with dad.

They want acceptance for their sexual experimentation, but should they receive anything other than censure? Should they be allowed to open a door to the inevitable demise of society? Acceptance would be the death-knell of an already imperiled but necessary institution of the family.