Unraveling

The National Review is neither inspired of God nor is it inerrant.  Only one place you can go to find such a writing (no, not ESPN).  NR does, however, provide some great fodder for cranial cud-chewing.

In a recent article, Rich Lowry, NR's editor, reviewed a speech* given by Charles Murray on the disintegration of two distinct classes in our nation, and to prevent it from becoming an issue of ethnicity, Murray sticks to "white America" thereby preventing any from shrugging these issues off as merely a problem for American blacks, hispanics, Portuguese, Puerto Ricans, Port-au-Princians, etc.

Two troubling highlights.  Number one, marriage.

In 1960, everyone was married — 88 percent of the upper middle class and 83 percent of the working class. In 2010, 83 percent of the upper middle class is married and only 48 percent of the working class. 

And quite naturally, fewer marriages equates directly to more out of wedlock births.

In 1960, births to single mothers in the working class were just 6 percent; now they are close to 50 percent.

While conservatives fight to keep the American understanding of marriage as being between a man (one) and a woman (one), most of America doesn't seem terribly concerned about marriage of any aberration.  Considering God created marriage before any other institution, such wholesale rejection of marriage should at least get our attention.  The fundamental fabric of a civilized people depends upon strong and stable families.  Mighty hard to build community apart from them.

The second troubling highlight from Murray's speech is the working class' rejection of God, too.

Although secularization has long been on the rise, it’s more pronounced in the working class. Among the upper middle class, 42 percent say they either don’t believe in God or don’t go to church. In the working class, it’s 61 percent. In other words, a majority of the upper middle class still has some religious commitment, while a majority of the working class does not.

Rather than leave us to grope about trying to determine the "So what?" of the statistic, Murray fills in the blank with a 19th century observation:

“The American Constitution is remarkable for its simplicity; but it can only suffice a people habitually correct in their actions, and would be utterly inadequate to the wants of a different nation. Change the domestic habits of the Americans, their religious devotion, and their high respect for morality, and it will not be necessary to change a single letter of the Constitution in order to vary the whole form of their government.”

Such statistics obliterate the myth that Christ is merely an opiate for the uneducated masses.  No, the cross of Jesus Christ remains the only sanctuary for those who have come to recognize the festering foulness of their sin before a holy God, and the blood of Jesus Christ as the only cleanser to remove such rank stains.

There was a time when the upper class refused to accept the foolishness of God because they felt it interfered with their revelings, their decadence.  The Reformation brought God back to man by allowing the common man access to the Bible, God's message to man.  It infected all aspects of culture and Western Civilization spread like wildfire.  When America struggled to her feet in the 18th century, the upper middle and lower classes all stood firmly on the word of God. That continued through most of the twentieth century with only halls of academia and the culturati turning back to secular paganism.

Today, with the demise of the American family and parental unwillingness to weave their values into their children and with school and culture holding sway over our children until their mid-twenties, is it any surprise that the preponderance of society has bought into the god of self?

Murray and Lowry are right.  Balancing the national budget is not the greatest crisis our nation faces.  It is a doozy (and I believe it, too, finds its troubled roots in the dissolution of the family and the distrust of God), but it pales in comparison to what's unraveling below the surface.

Time to look into the mirror and start bolstering those things each of us can bolster.  Start with God.  Move on to your family.  Perhaps we can stem the tide before our nation's nothing more than a tangled heap of knots.

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*The speech is forty-eight minutes long with forty minutes of question-and-answer to follow.