America’s secret sauce for generations of success was a strong religious ethos. As generations of Americans have grown up removed from religious teaching and practice, two Americas emerge that seem unable to communicate with each other.
Many moons ago, I was born in Chicago at Lutheran General Hospital. One notices that newer hospitals tend to have sterile names like “University Medical Center” but the old ones have names like St. Mary’s and Mt. Sinai. It is not such a surprise as religious aid organizations often provided food and housing for the needy and medical help for the sick. It was part of the religious view of responsibility for one’s neighbor. Today, we just assume that the government deals with such issues.
For most of its history, the US has been a relatively religious country. While the Founding Fathers refused to establish a national church, they strongly encouraged and protected the right of religious expression for all religions in the colonies and later in the fledgling United States. Values derived from religious teachings permeated the American people and had a strong impact both in the home and in the public square. Even today, Americans give generously of their time and money to others in need all around the globe. I once saw a paper that could not understand such altruistic behavior because according to evolution, one should reserve all of his resources for his own advancement and benefit. All religions put a strong emphasis on helping those in need and Americans show their generosity with the giving of charity and helping those harmed by earthquakes, tsunamis and the like throughout the world. I was once hooked up to an IV here in Jerusalem, and the drop counter had a big “US AID” sticker on it.
Religion tends to give its practitioners a values coordinate system. Good and bad, evil and holy are defined and a religious person ideally lives his or her life according to the tenets of belief that they hold dear. There are of course failures in every religion where someone who shows an outward religious persona performs deeds that are abominable. That does not deny the value of the religious teachings or the importance of a lifestyle that is associated with a religiously committed life.
What happens when a country whose rights are defined as having been given by G-d becomes far less religious? What does it mean to a secular person brought up in a secular home by religiously-indifferent parents and trained at completely secular schools to be told that a fetus has the sanctity of life or that one's right to own a gun is given by a power that no government can abrogate? The results of a religious or religiously-inspired “right” and a secular “left” are a lack of communication and understanding. It’s like two builders, one using feet for measurement and the other using meters. Everything they try to do together goes nowhere because they are talking about different measurement systems. Something like this happened to a friend of mine who rode his bike through Europe. He unknowingly passed a border and went to a store to buy some food. He complained to the store clerk how expensive everything was. He was then informed that he had moved onto a different currency and the prices reflected a completely different set of coins and bills.
I previously wrote about the long-overdue departure of Claudine Gay from Harvard. I went through some Twitter responses to her resignation and one could divide them into two. The more standard response on the right was goodbye and good riddance. Her failure to tackle antisemitism and her blatant plagiarism were definitely firing offenses. The latter particularly is a form of stealing. If I work very hard to come up with an idea or spend weeks in libraries to find information from numerous sources, it would be stealing for someone to simply lift my work without giving me the credit for my thinking or effort. But the response on the left was something else, which obviously is no surprise. They cried racism—the woman was chased from her job because she is black. The fairly strong plagiarism argument was all but written off. Why? “Thou shalt not steal” is a religious teaching and for generations, even in a fairly secular America, it was understood by all that stealing was wrong, period. But not anymore. We have all seen videos of people taking garbage bags of new clothes and other items out of stores without any security guard or police action for fear of being punished for confronting the thieves. I was present at a Marshalls in Las Vegas when a guy walked out with two bags of designer shirts. If stealing is okay by society’s new standards, then what is the problem with plagiarism? I noticed on the pro-Gay posts that her lifting other people’s work was considered like parking in handicapped parking spot—not a good thing to do but no big deal.
These then are the wages of a loss of religiosity in America. That men and women are different is an obvious point in the Bible (and biology) and one that was accepted since the beginning of time. Not anymore. Just ask the women who have lost to guys with lipstick and wigs in swimming, running, and biking. Birth rates have fallen off of a cliff in all Western countries as the religious command, “Be fruitful and multiply” is drowned out by the high cost of bringing up children, the desire for freedom of travel, and the focus on work over family. Basic religious concepts such as not stealing (see above) and not killing are forgotten or ignored. A guy can push someone in front of a train in New York or stab somebody to death in Chicago and be back on the streets in a matter of days. In the past, such actions led to the electric chair.
I saw over the New Year’s holiday the pro-Hamas crowd using their cars to prevent people from getting to JFK—an old Alinsky tactic. In the past, such behavior would not have been tolerated. If needed, a bulldozer would have been brought in to remove the protesters and allow people to fly home or visit grandma. Today, the police stand paralyzed, and no one is punished for ruining others’ travel plans. The police have no backing to take strong action because secular leaders see no reason to arrest or otherwise punish people who ruin others' lives, all while demanding the genocide of the Jewish people.
I would never ever suggest that the US should invoke religious coercion to get others to buy into a more religious lifestyle and attitude. One needs only to look at how miserable citizens in Iran and women in Afghanistan are to realize that forcing people to be religious does not work. With that said, I must also note that many of the great successes of the United States and the unique society built over more than 200 years were the outcome of religious values passed on from one generation to the next. Can a highly secular America succeed? While my hope is yes, my concern is that once one does not believe that a Higher Being is the source of our rights and freedoms, then people will simply use the government much as they did during Covid to trample on the rights of free speech, assembly, and religious expression. America’s success requires a religious underpinning. Without it, we end up with Claudine Gays running America’s formerly great institutions into the ground. Just look at the demise of once amazing California to get an idea where secular America is headed.
FDR did not seem like an overly religious president, but he knew that America’s resolve to beat its enemy needed Divine help. In his address to Congress the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, he made as much clear:
“With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounding determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us G-d.”
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