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11. THE 1970s: AMERICA DIVIDED

THE FRACTURING OF AMERICA'S TRADITIONAL SOCIAL-MORAL ORDER

CONTENTS

The assault on the American family

The rise of Federal Judicial legislation

Christianity in trouble

Lemon v. Kurtzman  (1971)

The Humanists respond

Mainline Christianity in crisis

The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
        America's Story – A Spiritual Journey © 2021, pages 361-366.
THE ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN FAMILY

Since the days of the Puritans, the political foundations of American politics had always been the family – an enormously strong social institution able to carry the heavy responsibilities of truly democratic governance – meaning exactly, governance by the people themselves.  The family was represented in the voting for local community officers, from city hall to the school board.  The family controlled the nation's economy through the simple device of local demand for goods and the willingness to use family wealth to purchase these goods.  It even controlled its religion through the ability to call, by way of a congregation's vote, their own pastors to their pulpits.

Men worked hard in fields, factories and mines to put food on the table.  Women represented the family in the larger social context (church work, library work, sewing circles, etc.).  And children were raised at an early age to prepare to take up just those same roles.

But now, centuries later, things were changing – dramatically.  The call to family duty was being replaced by the call to personal professionalism.  Getting married and having a family was put off so as not to interfere with the task of achieving and developing a person's professional status – women as well as men now.  Indeed, marriages were no longer life-time commitments – but instead divorce was becoming rampant (as many as 50% of Boomer marriages were ending in divorce) – thanks in part to the no-fault divorce and the prenuptial agreements where divorce was understood to be a huge possibility even as a man and a woman entered marriage.

Sex was now viewed widely as a matter of recreation – not family responsibility.  Consequently, abortions exploded in number as unwanted pregnancies multiplied dramatically in the new age of "free sex."

Also the role of the male became confused – as men were told to back down and let the women advance in the professional world outside the family.  Indeed, feminism even took on a distinct anti-male quality – as men were accused of being "male chauvinist pigs" in not letting women advance to full equality with them in the workplace.  Lesbianism (what woman would come to have any affection at all for a male chauvinist pig?) developed as women fell into each other's arms – and male homosexuality now "came out" in huge public displays as men simply found mutual attraction in each other's company (expressed in a typical male fashion, to be sure).

A classic example of how far America had moved from its 1950s idealization of the American family is summed up in the top-rated TV series All in the Family (which ran through the entire 1970s) in which Archie Bunker, the father, is portrayed as the quite ignorant male chauvinist, his wife Edith as the male-dominated (but subtly the one with something of real social sensibility) wife, and two Boomer college-age kids – who pretty much played out the classic Boomer roles. America did not realize that it was laughing at the very institution that had long carried America through hard times as well as good times.  The family now seemed overstated, ridiculous at times, and generally an almost pointless accident as a social institution.

THE RISE OF FEDERAL JUDICIAL LEGISLATION

Since the early 1960s, "Progressive" organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had demonstrated that the Federal Judiciary – rather than Congress – was the place to go to get their programs put in place as national law.  A favorable decision required only five individuals of the nine Supreme Court judges in order to get the kinds of laws that the ACLU wanted to see direct the country.  That certainly was easier than going through the complicated task of getting multitudes of Congressmen and Senators (ever sensitive to the views and feelings of the American voter) – plus a willing president – to put those laws into full effect.

Desegregation.    Thus it was that federal judges – even at the regional level of the federal circuit courts – got into the legislation business.  For instance, federal judges took it upon themselves in a number of court cases to design exactly the specific ways that the country was to undertake racial integration (as in the 1969 U.S. v. Montgomery County Board of Education decision) – establishing specific racial hiring goals and various bussing programs sending specific numbers of school children to this or that local school district – regardless of the views of the local citizens, even when Black parents showed an interest in sending their children to schools of their own racial character (as in the 1968 Green v. County School Board) – all of this supported all the way up to the Supreme Court (the 1971  Swann v. Charlotte Mecklenburg Board of Education case).  This judicially-decreed program coming from the Supreme Court would naturally survive all political challenges over the next thirty years.[1] 

Abortion.  Then there was the matter of abortions – outlawed in the majority of American states.  A Texas law prohibiting abortion made its way up to the Supreme Court in 1973 (with others much like it pending) in the case of Roe v. Wade.  In a 7-2 decision, the Texas law was overthrown, because it (according to the 14th Amendment) deprived a woman of her right to due process.  Realizing the highly controversial nature of this ruling, the Supreme Court then set out specific terms by 3-month periods as to when an abortion could occur, with increasingly restrictive standards as the fetus developed into a full child.  That was simply legislation!

In any case, feminists were overjoyed – and Christians deeply outraged, for Christianity had always considered life from the moment of inception as belonging to God – neither man nor woman.  To them Roe v. Wade simply amounted to court-approved murder.  But there was little that the Christian world could do.  The Supreme Court had made it quite clear on which side of the moral issue it stood (at least the majority of its members, anyway).  And there was no known appeal that Americans could make to block a Supreme-Court-created law.<

[1]Did desegregation equal integration?  Not exactly, as the bitter anti-White attitudes of the Black Panthers demonstrated, even as White America was moving strongly to desegregate the country. Desegregation could be done under government authority, no matter what the public feelings were on the matter.  But integration requires a change in the human heart, not something that laws can themselves generate.  That takes inspiring leadership to develop the necessary changes in human hearts.

CHRISTIANITY IN TROUBLE

Right along with the middle-class family, Christianity was finding itself losing status at the heart of American culture – for the two were closely connected.  And behind this was again, the Supreme Court and the legal crusaders of the American Left – who wanted to see Christianity gone from all public life.  Citing the First Amendment as calling for the separation of church and state, in case after case the Supreme Court had since the early 1960s been invoking the "non-establishment clause" of the Amendment as actually calling for the legal disestablishment of Christianity whenever and wherever it should come into the ever widening realm of the state – meaning, virtually all public life now.  Even locally, the state (local schools, town halls, public parks) could not involve itself with the Christian religion in any way – for to do so would be to "establish" it.  The fact that this had long been a key part of local life was no longer sufficient reason to allow this to continue.  And all of this was done in violation of the protections of religion outlined in the First Amendment which stated clearly that Congress (meaning the part of the Federal system that made its laws, not anticipating that the Supreme Court would take over supreme responsibility in that area) was to "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."  But prohibiting the free exercise was exactly what the Supreme Court was doing.  How was it that the Supreme Court could not find itself able to defend the very clear wording of the Constitution?

LEMON V. KURTZMAN (1971)

Worse, the Supreme Court even got into the business of the "establishment of religion" in its 1971 decision in the Lemon v. Kurtzman case.  Its decision stated that only secular (or basically non-Christian) programming could be part of the local school program.  Also, the only material that could be brought into the classroom had to clearly serve a purely secular purpose.

Supposedly secularism was not a religious matter, and therefore the Supreme Court felt it fully within its power to prescribe the Secular Worldview as the only worldview to be presented and worked from in developing the thinking and understanding of America's rising generations.

What this small group of "enlightened" lawyers was doing was actually deciding for the rest of the country the quite religious question as to the dynamic source of life.  They had made for the country the decision that life was to be understood as being by nature purely secular, that is, mechanical, operating only from a set of natural laws that scientists (social and physical) have discovered – or will soon discover anyway – which direct all existence.

And that sense of life being purely mechanical extended also to all social as well as material dynamics (the Humanist part of Secularism).  According to Secular-Humanists, society too operates strictly according to a set of mechanical or "natural" social laws, which "social scientists" are working hard to discover.

And in any case, being purely "mechanical" in view of life and its dynamics, Secularism cannot be considered to be "religious", because religion is only about supernatural or "non-mechanical" causes.  Or so the Secularists argued.

Therefore, anything to do with advancing a Christian worldview, being obviously religious in nature, was supposedly forbidden by the Constitution (which part were they actually referring to?).  Only Secularism had the right to be established (by the Court itself) as America's fundamental worldview (in other words, religion), the only one to be allowed legal support in America's public life.

Wow!  With that Supreme Court decision, the people's right to determine those religious matters themselves, one of their key freedoms – the first one to be mentioned, in fact, in the First Amendment – just got thrown out.  Religious orthodoxy was now completely in the hands of the federal judges, the new high priests of Secularism.

THE HUMANISTS RESPOND

Of course the American Humanist Association   [2]recognized its opportunity in the Kurtzman ruling – but also the dangers.  If the original Humanist Manifesto (1933) had been brought into the Kurtzman hearings, it would have been very clear that what the Supreme Court was supporting was indeed a religion, not merely some neutral Truth – because the Manifesto itself clearly confessed this to be the case in its repeated use of the term "Religious Humanism."  Consequently, the organization came out in 1973 with the Humanist Manifesto II – in which all the language about Humanism as being a new, more progressive religion was dropped.  Humanism was simply pure science, nothing more.

[2]The Humanist Association states in its letterhead: "Good without a God: Advocating progressive values and equality for humanists, atheists, and freethinkers."

MAINLINE CHRISTIANITY IN CRISIS

As the 1970s rolled along it became increasingly apparent that the traditional denominations (Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopal, etc.) were being sustained largely by an ageing Vet generation.  Boomers showed little interest in participating in, much less committing themselves to, congregational life.

To try to reverse a persistent decline in numbers, church officials at the national level attempted to design programs that would adjust their denomination's agendas in a way to make them more relevant to the changing culture around them.  They proudly took up the causes of "peace and social justice," authorizing special seminars on the subjects – and just in general going on public record in favor of this or that stand (mostly Leftist) similar to the progressivist world around them.  "Old-time religion" (personal salvation and gospel missionary work among the unchurched at home and abroad) dropped from the agenda.

But sadly, all this did was make their churches so much like that larger, secular culture that there was very little reason to come into church from that culture – when culture and church offered mostly the same programs.  Thus the persistent decline in Mainline Christianity continued.

Sadly, the denominational leaders never caught on to what was actually happening, or were so deeply committed to their religious "Liberalism" that they refused to change course.



Go on to the next section:  The World's Sole Superpower

  Miles H. Hodges