Christians are a minority when it comes to sex outside of marriage.
The Christian church teaches that sexual activity outside of marriage is a sin, but most Americans think it is morally acceptable.
The good news is that if the immoral majority will leave us alone, the Christian minority is large enough to prevail over time. Let Christians govern as they wish in states where they remain a majority and let “liberal” Christians, other religions, and the non-religious govern as they choose. The poor will suffer first from immorality.
American Christians created educational institutions and wealth all over the Republic, but time passed and as often happens those at the top of the socio-economic heap forgot what got them there. Having been born on third, they decided they hit a tripe. Meanwhile, the orignal American sin of slavery and racism, hostile to Christian history off this continent, retarded the development of the South.
The wages of sin is always death: cultural, economic, and social death.
Of course, change in human affairs takes place over generations. As New England secularized, it retained most of Christian morality. Harvard could no longer tell you why “love, marriage, and then sex ,” but the order was honored, at least publicly. Publicly was good enough when popular television programs like Adam-12 were warning against premarital sex as late as the 1970s.
Of course, New England also retained huge Christian populations as well.
But things have been changing as the generation that knew Annette Funicello ages and those that watched Buffy come into power. The old intellectual centers have solid majorities that have embraced the new morality, which was the old immortality.
Meanwhile, the South has gone far to shake off the shackles of yesterday. Nobody should be shocked when Republicans in the Carolinas send an African-American to Congress. Solid, though slowly declining, majorities of the population still embrace the old sexual morality, though amongst the unchurched poor, most impacted by media education on sexual issues, the harm has been done.
And yet in the South, I predict enough Christian workers remain to lead to a revival of the Christian faith. The poor could dead end in the government welfare and behavioral trap that has destroyed so much of Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago or it could embrace the Faith. Does anyone doubt that if a young man did what his Southern Baptist pastor advised that by twenty-two, he would be better able to compete or even reject the Faith that if he had followed the general advice of television?
There are signs that the relative decline of the Church, always exaggerated in any case, has stopped and millennials are returning to Church, but this revival is not happening evenly across the nation.
What is that advice? Eat, drink, and make merry . . . and don’t worry about dying, because late night television will find a cure.
So here is my predication: New England, California, and other regions have enough cultural wealth that it will take some time, but a decline is coming. It will start slowly and then pick up speed. The religious and the middle class will leave first, but then the jobs will start to follow. Pockets of “liberalism” in the South will attract even left-of-center types to a dynamic region.
What of media destruction?
Arguably the widespread availability of porn has done a great deal to change social attitudes. Big Media will keep pushing the “sex, love, then marriage maybe” line. What folk miss is the ability of traditionalists to ignore Big Media. A person can now craft their entertainment choices around their values easily. I can watch a classical film tonight and support an innovative film maker like Josh Sikora of HBU over the weekend. Houston will not long let New York and Los Angelas dictate their viewing choices.
If left alone, there is no reason that we will not see two nations. Parts of the West, especially regions like Utah and Idaho, with parts of the South (minus border areas such as Virginia) will pose an experiment in traditionalism. The good thing about the experiment is that they will start with a relative cultural disadvantage. Alabama and Idaho don’t start as former centers of industrial or educational wealth.
The next century, if they are left alone, will change that ranking.
Massachusetts will fade and Texas will blossom.
Of course, this depends on Texas recognizing that she cannot keep sending her children to Texas schools run by Massachusetts academics. It will also depend on a revival amongst Christians in places like Texas and further ending the evils of religious segregation. The coming Hispanic majority must be fully integrated into the present conservative establishment.
This can be done and there are signs that is being done.
My grandchildren are likely to see a North much smaller in relative size, like England a tourist haven, with cultural institutions surviving and sometimes thriving mostly on legacy. Meanwhile, the real cultural ferment and change will be in the South and non-coastal West. There a conservative majority will engage intellectually with an active liberal minority. Parts of the “North,” particularly Ohio may be reclaimed to traditional ways. New York City, with a large religious population, is an interesting case. Meanwhile parts of the South, perhaps Texas as a whole, may gain a secular majority if the traditionalists allow racism or ethnocentrism to corrupt.
These will be interesting times, but this much we know: traditional morality is time tested and will prevail. So to my great-grandchildren, if they read these words in a revived American republic: know the times were not so dark that all of us lost the Faith.
We knew you were coming in God’s good time.
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