The United States has displayed a remarkable and long-standing tendency not only to tolerate, but to honor and reward, those who decry the nation’s morality and predict its imminent and inevitable doom.

Consider Pat Buchanan’s new bestseller, “Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology and Greed are Tearing America Apart.” This magnum opus follows his similarly cheerful (and successful) releases, “State of Emergency” and “The Death of the West.” In the opening pages of the most recent book, “Pitchfork Pat” dramatically declaims:

“Truly, America faces an existential crisis… It is the belief of the author and the premise of this book that America is indeed coming apart, decomposing, and that the likelihood of her survival as one nation through mid-century is improbable- and impossible if America continues on her current course. For we are on a path to national suicide.”

Buchanan hardly stands alone in announcing the upcoming destruction or dissolution of the republic. John F. MacArthur, the influential California pastor, President of The Master’s College, and author of some fifty books on the Bible and contemporary life, recently declared: “There comes a point in God’s dealing with men and nations, groups of people, when He abandons them….Sin is so rampant in our country, it is so widespread, it is so tolerated by people in leadership and even people in the church, it is so widely tolerated it is pandemic: it is endemic; that is, it is in the very fabric of our life that I believe God has just taken away the restraining grace that might preserve our nation, and has let our nation run to its own doom.”

Similarly, the late Jerry Falwell described the September 11th terrorist attacks as a tragic but inevitable, divinely ordained response to rampant immorality and Godlessness on the national scene. “God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve,” he said during a hugely controversial television broadcast (for which he subsequently apologized). He singled out immoral ideas and behaviors spiraling out of control across the country, accusing those who insisted on “throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools. The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked.” Three days later, trying to explain his comments to John F. Harris of the Washington Post, Reverend Falwell more modestly observed: “When a nation deserts God and expels God from the culture… the result is not good.” On many other occasions, the affable preacher from Lynchburg, Virginia, drew bemused chuckles with the observation: “If God doesn’t wipe out San Francisco some time soon, He’s going to have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah.” His words conjure up a compelling vision of the Environmental Protection Agency someday striving mightily to clear the sulphur, brimstone and salt pillars from the Golden Gate.

And speaking of San Francisco, Michael Savage (nee, Michael Weiner), the perpetually enraged talk radio Jeremiah of Baghdad by the Bay, joins the Loonie Left in seeing the impending onset of Naziism. “I am more and more convinced that we have a one-party oligarchy ruling our nation,” he warned in “The Savage Nation,” his 2002 national bestseller. “In short, the ‘Republicrats’ and 'Demicans’ have sacked our Constitution, our culture, our religions, and embarrassed the nation…Again, the last years of the Weimar Republic of pre-Nazi Germany come to mind – where decadence completely permeated a free society.”

While activists and academics on the political left have always played the lead role in passionately promoting the many pernicious lies about America’s allegedly guilty past, it's mostly commentators on the cultural right who enthusiastically embrace the lies about the nation’s guilty present and doomed future. Looking down on previous generations and condemning our Founding Fathers as Indian-slaughtering, slave-owning, Euro-centrist, money-grubbing elitists can bring obvious psychic rewards to those who endorse such caricatures. If our ancestors deserve more condemnation than reverence, we face little obligation to live up to their ideals or examples and can feel free to make our rules, shape our own values, with an unshakable sense of greater wisdom and moral superiority. It’s much harder, however, to see the emotional or practical payoffs in apocalyptic hysteria about our current condition.

Smearing prior generations can enhance our sense of unique and unprecedented excellence (“Never trust anyone over thirty,” the notorious Baby Boomers once declared). Perhaps, in the same sense, the militant alarmism about our current moral state can promote the conviction that confirmed gloom-and-doomers are much smarter, more righteous, more attuned to horrifying realities than the obtuse people (or “sheepel,” as they are derisively designated) who refuse to acknowledge looming disaster.

This doesn’t mean that selfish or insincere motives always shape the outlook of those who see America as corrupt beyond redemption. Most moral alarmists nurse the forlorn hope that their stern warnings will somehow motivate the society to abjure its evil ways before we pass the final point of no return. For many reasons, however, common sense dictates that exaggerating our decadence, dysfunction and desperation will make revival and renewal less likely and more difficult.

Even so, it’s impossible to deny that those who regularly wail about The End Of American Civilization As We Know It. (TEOACAWKI) take their part in a long and (mostly) honorable tradition that goes all the way back to the earliest days of Colonial settlement.

NEARLY FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF “THE END IS NEAR”

We prefer to think of William Bradford, the long time leader of the Pilgrim Separatists and for thirty years the elected governor of Plymouth Colony, as a courageous man of faith who calmly overcame every obstacle to establish his profoundly significant settlement in the Massachusetts wilderness. Some twenty-five years after taking shore at Plymouth Rock, however, Bradford himself became the first major American commentator to see evidence of deadly moral decay and a betrayal of his society’s heroic past.

In 1645, he made one of the last significant entries in his journal while in an obviously mournful mood: “O sacred bond, which inviolably preserved! How sweet and precious were the fruits that flowed from the same! But when this fidelity decayed, then their ruin approached. O that these ancient members had not died or been dissipated (if it had been the will of God) or else that this holy care and constant faithfulness had still lived, and remained with those that survived, and were in times afterwards added unto them. But (alas) that subtle serpent that slyly wound himself under fair pretenses of necessity and the like, to untwist these sacred bonds and ties….It is now a part of my misery in old age, to find and feel the decay and want thereof (in a great measure) and with grief and sorrow of heart and bewail the same. And for others’ warning and admonition, and my own humiliation, do I here note the same.”

Historians argue about the reasons Bradford looked so harshly at his own prospering and secure settlement. A few years earlier, in the “horrible” year of 1642, a Plymouth youth named Thomas Granger had to be executed for the unspeakable sin of bestiality (along with all the animals he had defiled). Whatever the cause, virtually every subsequent generation echoed Bradford’s certainty that new attitudes, sins and shortcomings proved unworthy of a sacred, noble past.

One of the old Pilgrim’s spiritual successors, the great preacher (and President of Princeton) Jonathan Edwards, wrote that the 1730’s represented “a far more degenerate time…than ever before.” In his immortal 1741 sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” he riveted the devout Puritan churchgoers in Northampton, Massachusetts and Enfield, Connecticut, by telling them: “ Yea, God is a great deal more angry with great numbers that are now on earth: yea, doubtless, with many that are now in this congregation, who it may be are at ease, than he is with many of those who are now in the flames of hell…The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber; the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow. The glittering sword is whet, and held over them, and the pit hath opened its mouth under them.”

Almost exactly a century later another New England preacher, anti-slavery firebrand William Lloyd Garrison, denounced the impiety and hypocrisy and degradation of his own temporizing generation: “I accuse the land of my nativity of insulting the Majesty of Heaven with the grossest mockery that was ever exhibited to man,” he thundered. He also denounced the Constitution as “a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell” and frequently burned copies of the nation’s founding document to signify God’s righteous wrath.

Billy Sunday, former major league outfielder (for the Philadelphia Phillies and other teams) and famous revivalist, led another moral crusade against the decadence of early twentieth century America: as “the sworn, eternal and uncompromising enemy of the Liquor Traffic. I have been, and will go on, fighting that damnable, dirty, rotten business with all the power at my command,” he fervently pledged in his most famous sermon, “Get On the Water Wagon.” The Evangelist also opposed public dancing, card-playing, attending the theatre, reading novels, and baseball games on Sunday. Even before the “loss of innocence” associated with America’s entry into World War I, he asked one of his huge audiences: “Did you ever know a time in all history when the world was worse than it is now? People are passing up the Church and the Prayer Meeting for the theatre, the leg show and the movies. Oh, Lord, how we need someone to cry aloud, ‘Return to God!’”

In view of our nostalgic view of earlier epochs in U.S. history, these energetic denunciations may look excessive or inappropriate, but they represented men of conscience and character righteously (and mostly rightly) pointing out the sins and shortcomings of the society around them. In some cases, they managed to play positive roles in various awakenings and revivals that periodically changed American society for the better—giving the lie to the common assumption that moral degradation is a one way street that leads year by year, generation by generation, only downhill.

HISTORY OFFERS ABUNDANT EVIDENCE OF MORAL TURNAROUNDS

Most Americans properly revere the remarkable Revolutionary generation and associate lofty moral standards with the spectacularly gifted and energetic colonists who defied an Empire and shaped a durable Republic. Of course, such uncritical adulation of the past must look beyond the highly questionable sexual adventures of many of the most prominent Founding Fathers, including Franklin (an illegitimate son in New Jersey, and numerous romantic conquests during his missions to France), Jefferson (a deep love affair with a beautiful married woman and probable long-term relations with his own teenaged slave, Sally Hemings), Hamilton (a torrid affair with a married woman, while paying blackmail to her husband) and Aaron Burr (literally scores of passionate affairs and persistent rumors of incest with his glamorous daughter). Statistically, a high percentage of first children in Colonial marriages (as much as 30% in some cities) arrived less than seven months after the wedding ceremony ---a powerful indication that strict self control escaped young Americans of more than two hundred years ago much as it escapes too many young people today.

In one area, however, today’s citizens display vastly better discipline and higher moral standards. In their essay “Drinking in America,” historians Mark Lender and James Martin report: “One may safely assume… that abstemious colonials were few and far between. Counting the mealtime beer and cider at home and the convivial drafts at the tavern or at the funeral of a relative or neighbor, all this drinking added up….While precise consumption figures are lacking, informed estimates suggest that by the 1790’s an average American over fifteen years old drank just under six gallons of absolute alcohol a year… The comparable modern average is less than 2.0 gallons per capita.” This indulgence created worrisome problems with public drunkenness in Philadelphia, Boston, New York and other Colonial centers that mirrored, though never equaled, the appalling alcoholism that plagued contemporary masses in London.

In terms of building the nation’s wealth and providing for the comfort of its citizens, American progress has been inexorable in one direction. In terms of any measure of morality, however, the nation has experienced a dizzying roller-coaster of steep ups and downs, zig zags, climbs and reverses, and even loop-the-loops. Religious historians refer to four distinct “Great Awakenings” that profoundly impacted the course of history and the ethical outlook of the populace: the first (from the 1730’s through the 1750’s) led by fiery preachers like Jonathan Edwards and British visitors George Whitfield and the Wesley Brothers, spread from rural districts to the largest cities and helped lay the groundwork for the American Revolution. The second (from 1800 through the 1830’s) brought camp meetings that drew tens of thousands even in remote frontier settlements, the founding of pious, non-conformist sects (including the Mormon Church), and new energy for the anti-slavery and women’s suffrage movements. The Third Awakening (1880’s through 1900’s) brought the Holiness movement, the beginnings of American Pentecostalism, Christian Science, the Social Gospel, Progressive politics, and the resurgent Temperance movement. Many sociologists and theologians see a Fourth Awakening beginning in the late 1970’s and continuing to the present day, evidenced by the power of the so-called “Religious Right,” the growth of Evangelical “Mega-Churches” and a vastly expanded Christian influence in popular culture. Regardless of how one evaluates the significance and lasting impact of each of these periods of revival and turbulence, they give evidence that the nation’s moral and religious history has hardly followed a straight line toward degeneracy and shattered traditions.

In her supremely valuable book “The De-Moralization of Society,” historian Gertrude Himmelfarb focuses on the British model to show that reformers can exert a profound impact on a nation’s manners and morals, virtues and values. The Victorian Era, popularly identified with stuffy, restrictive and judgmental codes of behavior, actually represented a conscious reaction to the excesses and debauchery of the 1700’s. The raising of social standards (readily apparent in statistics on illegitimacy, drunkenness, crime, abandonment of children and more) resulted from conscious efforts by mobilized moralists. “In addition to societies for the promotion of piety and virtue,” Himmelfarb writes, “others were established for the relief of the poor and infirm- for destitute orphans and abandoned children, aged widows and penitent prostitutes, the deaf, dumb, blind, and otherwise incapacitated….The idea of moral reformation also extended to such humanitarian causes as the elimination of flogging in the army and navy, the abolition of the pillory and public whipping, the prohibition of cockfighting, bull-baiting, and bearbaiting, and, most important, the abolition of the slave trade…Less formally, but no less effectively, they promoted those manners and morals that have come to be known as ‘Victorian values.’….The ‘moral reformation’ initiated in the late eighteenth century came to fruition in the late nineteenth century.”

The inspiring story Himmelfarb tells represents one of the most spectacular examples of self-conscious social betterment in all of human history –an improvement in which the United States without question followed the British example. As Himmelfarb concludes: “At the end of the nineteenth century, England was a more civil, more pacific, more humane society than it had been in the beginning. ‘Middle-class’ manners and morals had penetrated into large sections of the working classes. The traditional family was as firmly established as ever, even as feminist movements proliferated and women began to be liberated from their ‘separate spheres.’”

In addition to such sweeping changes of direction, the United States has experienced more limited periods of disruption or renewal. In the Twentieth Century, two world wars undermined the stability of family life and traditional mores, while the 1950’s and its era of American dominance, prosperity and religiosity, saw dramatic improvements in divorce rates, criminality, drug and alcohol addiction, and access to higher education.

The counter-cultural explosions of the 1960’s, viewed by many as the final blow to parental authority, sexual self-discipline, sobriety, and the work ethic, gave rise in less than twenty years to the era of Reaganism and “Morning in America.” Some of the same Baby Boomers who sang drug anthems by the Stones or the Beatles in 1968, came back to church and suburb by 1988, enrolling their children in religious schools and honoring the patriotic and entrepreneurial values the Hippie era so colorfully scorned.

Dr, Allen C. Carlson and Paul T. Mero, authors of “The Natural Family: A Manifesto” see these advances and setbacks as part of a long, indecisive struggle to preserve “the natural family – part of the created order, imprinted on our natures, the source of bountiful joy, the fountain of new life, the bulwark of ordered liberty.” Industrialization brought the “great disruption” that undermined “the natural ecology of family life” when “family-made goods and tasks became commodities, things to be bought and sold” with the factory and “mass state schools” taking children away from their previously home-centered lives. When the French Revolution gave ideological basis to these changes, “advocates for the natural family –figures such as Bonald and Burke – fought back. They defended the ‘little platoons’ of social life, most of all the home. They rallied the ideas that would show again the necessity of the natural family. They revealed the nature of organic society to be a true democracy of free homes.” After the British-led alliance crushed the revolutionary forces of France, “families reclaimed authority. The new, growing middle class soon crafted a moral order centered around the hearth and the mother in the home. More broadly, religious leaders and social reformers worked successfully to tame the industrial impulse.”

Of course, other pendulum swings rapidly followed – with the all-powerful state of Communist and Fascist ideology declaring open war on the family. When ‘60’s free-spirits intensified their own struggle, Carlson and Mero report, they never won the expected easy or sweeping victory. “As the culture turned hostile, natural families jolted back to awareness. Signs of renewal came from the new leaders and the growth of movements, popularly called ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-family’ which arose to defend the natural family. By the early twenty-first century, these – our- movements could claim some modest gains.”

While many social conservatives perversely refuse to recognize such gains, they need to be acknowledged and solidified to facilitate further progress in the future.

EVIDENCE OF IMPROVEMENT, ALONG WITH DECAY

Those who insist on the recent moral collapse of the United States as a dogmatically unchallenged article of faith need to consider a shocking report in the New York Times on November 23, 2007. Continued...