“New York City is on track to have fewer than 500 homicides this year, by far the lowest number in a 12-month period since reliable Police Department statistics became available in 1963,” noted America’s Journal of Record. “But within the city’s official crime statistics is a figure that may be even more striking: so far, with roughly half the killings analyzed, only 35 were found to be committed by strangers, a microscopic statistic in a city of more than 8.2 million.

“If that trend holds up, fewer than 100 homicides in New York City this year will have been strangers to their assailants. The vast majority died in disputes with friends or acquaintances, with rival drug gang members or –to a far lesser degree- with romantic partners, spouses, parents and others…In the eyes of some criminologists, the police will be hard pressed to drive the killing rate much lower, since most killings occur now within the four walls of an apartment or the confines of close relationships.”

The stunning enhancement of public safety in America’s largest city represents a stinging rebuke to those who persist in viewing the nation as a victim of one-dimensional moral breakdown and spreading anarchy. The change could hardly be more dramatic: New York recorded its greatest number of killings in a single year in 1990, with 2,245, and a majority of those deaths involved terrifying violence between strangers. Seventeen years later, the city saw only 428 killings by mid-November – a projected reduction in the murder rate of more than three-fourths, with a likely total of well under 100 victimizing strangers.

Other major cities may boast less spectacular progress than New York (with its two successive—and successful – crime-fighting Republican mayors) but they all show less violent and property crimes from their peaks in the 1970’s or ‘80’s. The criminal ethos regularly associated with social chaos and moral disorder has sharply retreated across the country, while other indicators also show a nation struggling to improve its spiritual and cultural health.

In July of 2007, the Associated Press reported on more encouraging numbers involving the next generation of Americans: “Fewer high school students are having sex these days, and more are using condoms. The teen birth rate has hit a record low. More young people are finishing high school, too, and more little kids are being read to, according to the latest government snapshot of the well-being of the nation’s children. It’s good news on a number of key wellness indicators, experts said of the report being released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics…. In 2005, 47% of high school students – 6.7 million – reported having had sexual intercourse, down from 54 percent in 1991.”

Even the Guttmacher Institute, affiliated with Planned Parenthood, reported similar declines in teenaged sexual activity. In September, 2006, the Institute observed that “teens are waiting longer to have sex than they did in the past…The proportion of teens who had ever had sex declined …from 55% to 46% among males” in just seven years between 1995 and 2002.

The reduced sexual activity has also brought about a sharp reduction in rates of abortion. The Guttmacher Institute (May, 2006) acknowledges that abortion rates peaked in 1981, just as our most outspokenly pro-life President, Ronald Reagan, entered the White House. In that year, doctors and clinics performed 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44. Twenty years later, after tireless efforts by pro-life activists and educators, that number had dropped steadily, year by year, all the way to 21.1, a reduction of nearly 30%. Meanwhile, the number of U.S. abortion providers also declined by 11% in just four years between 1996 and 2000 and, according to all recent reports, continues to decline.

In terms of family structure, common assumptions receive little confirmation from available statistics. The divorce rate, for instance, certainly soared in the late ‘60’s and ‘70’s, reached its peak in 1981, then has gone down steadily (if slightly) since that time. Despite worrisome increases in out of wedlock birth, that phenomenon also began to recede in the 1990’s (most notably in the African-American community). Though the much derided “Ozzie and Harriet” family no longer looks as solid or ubiquitous as it did fifty years ago, the Census Bureau’s most recent statistics (2003) show a surprising total of 68.4% of all children below the age of 18 (of all races) currently living in households with two parents; among white children that number reaches 74.2%. Despite its battering in the media, the family remains the normal, prevalent unit of social organization for the purpose of child-rearing.

Moreover, the characters on “Desperate Housewives” may display attitudes and behaviors that represent today’s realities as poorly as some of the idealized family TV shows (“Father Knows Best,” “Leave It to Beaver”) portrayed the complexities of real-life relationships in the 1950’s. In their enormously helpful book “The First Measured Century,” scholars from the American Enterprise Institute report: “The declining incidence of extramarital sex may seem implausible to television viewers who see a world of wholesale promiscuity in which marital fidelity is the exception rather than the rule. The data tell a different story….The remaining bars on the chart, based on the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey, show an unmistakable decline in extramarital sexual activity during the latter part of the century, especially among married men.”

The various numbers and analyses hardly paint a portrait of some golden age of moral rectitude, or even of functional families: not at a time when nearly thirty per cent of all American children enter the world without the benefit of married parents, or when cohabitation before marriage (despite indisputably increasing the likelihood of divorce) has become vastly more common (and even the norm to many young people).

Nevertheless, the notion of a nation falling apart – “decomposing,” in Pat Buchanan’s pungent phrase – also fails to emerge from any honest examination of the data. The effort to “remoralize” America after the eruptions and disruptions of the ‘60’s has met with some success, but its future will depend to a great extent on the continued vitality of traditional religious faith.

KEEPING THE FAITH

During the heralded “New Age” of the Woodstock Generation, various celebrities and influential intellectuals pronounced the death of old-style American religiosity, and heralded its replacement with assorted cults, fads, and crackpots. Time magazine ran a cover story in 1969 that featured a black background with stark white lettering, proclaiming simply “God Is Dead.” A generation later, the Deity might authorize His representatives on earth to paraphrase Mark Twain: “reports of My demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

Few oracles predicted the stubborn resilience of Christian religious faith, with the most demanding and scripturally rigorous denominations showing the greatest vitality of all. Triumphal talk about the “Fourth Great Awakening” may have begun to evaporate between the Bush re-election of 2004 (with its much discussed emphasis on “Values Voters” of traditionalist religious leanings) and the countervailing Democratic triumph of 2006 (featuring Congressional leaders and prominent candidates openly hostile to the priorities of the so-called “Religious Right”).

Nevertheless, the United States remains an incurably religious society, with levels of belief and participation vastly higher than our counterparts in Western Europe. For instance, Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Wall Street Journal (November 24, 2007) reported regular attendance at religious services in the United Kingdom at 7% (and a pathetic 2% for the official Church of England). The lowest comparable figures for the United States (reported by Professor Robert Wuthrow of Princeton in a Heritage Foundation Lecture of October 4, 2007) ranged between 30 and 35% of the adult population.

Meanwhile, the Gallup Organization offers its own “Index of Leading Religious Indicators,” measuring a variety of variables: belief in God, the importance of religion in lives, membership in churches, weekly worship attendance, confidence in organized religion, confidence in ethics of clergy, and relevance of religion in today’s society. Gathering data on these issues going back to 1941, Gallup (like other surveys) shows 1957-58 as a peak year for religiosity, followed by precipitous declines, then another rise between 1977 and ’85. After another thirty point decline between the Reagan Era and the Middle of the Clinton Era (1996) religion resumed its upward march, with another twenty point rise. The headline for the overall study appropriately proclaimed: AMERICANS MORE RELIGIOUS NOW THAN TEN YEARS AGO, BUT LESS SO THAN IN 1950’S AND 1960’S.

In any event, the quickening of religious enthusiasm and the growth of evangelical denominations remains an undeniable fact of American cultural life. Professor Wuthrow of Princeton, generally skeptical of all talk of a religious revival, unequivocally acknowledges the swelling power and influence of conservative forces in scriptural interpretation. “First, as a proportion of the entire U.S. public, evangelical Protestant affiliation grew from around 17 to 20 percent in the early 1970’s to between 25 and 28 percent in more recent surveys. Second, because the affiliation with the more liberal or moderate mainline Protestant denominations was declining during this period, the relative strength of conservative Protestantism was even more evident. For example, conservative Protestantism had been only about two-thirds as prominent as mainline Protestantism in the early 1970’s but outstripped it by a margin of 2 to 1 in some of the more recent surveys.”

This phenomenon has produced an increasingly common generational contrast: young people (and especially young couples) who embrace a more fervent, more impassioned, more rigorous religiosity than their parents or grandparents. The clichéd melodramas in the ancient style of “The Jazz Singer” (1927) – where a youthful, assimilated, show business-crazy American rejects the pious, immigrant orthodoxy of his parents – have given way to distinctive Twenty First Century tales of a new generation renouncing pallid secularism and re-discovering long-forgotten traditions associated with an earlier era. USA TODAY reported on this new pattern and indicated that “clergy of all stripes say they are seeing a small wave of young adults who are more pious than their parents. And they’re getting an earful from boomer moms and dads who range from shocked to delighted.”

In other words, religiously as well as morally, Americans refuse to march in lock step along a single parade route, at the same time that we find ourselves unable to stand still. All measures of morality show a complex, multi-faceted, dynamic and, to some extent, turbulent nation. Some Americans (unfortunately concentrated in the entertainment industry, academia and other centers of major influence) explore decadence and experimental values with more daring or abandon than ever before. At the same time, many others flock to our churches and synagogues (where religious services regularly draw four times more participants than all feature films every weekend) and affirm faith-filled values with energy, self-confidence, and dedication that continue to energize the religious conservative movement. In a sense, most Americans have boarded one of two express trains racing in opposite directions – toward more radicalism, or more traditionalism; heading to greater skepticism and secularism on the one hand, or to more spirited religious commitment on the other.

In all cases, no passage is final: life-long skeptics and cynics may embrace Biblical truth in their ‘70’s or ‘80’s (like the celebrated and controversial case of the British professor Antony Flew) or prominent religious leaders, especially when tainted by scandal or tagged with hypocrisy, may walk away from the faith of a life time. Choice remains an option, both nationally and individually – even for those who believe that a Higher Power ultimately forces our hand.

Moreover, in the United States no story concludes with a single generation. Those raised in strictly religious homes will, on famous occasions, throw over the faith of their fathers with an angry and dismissive attitude while pursuing other sources of satisfaction. More frequently today, many children of un-churched, disillusioned and disaffiliated parents may become religious leaders and teachers – and even go home to recruit various siblings or elders.

America remains, as always and in all things, on the move. Those who have already written off this great and good society as the victim of inevitable moral disintegration or unstoppable degeneracy don’t understand the unfailing national capacity for fresh starts and new life.