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Part Five: Has Secular Postmodernism Benefited American Society or Destroying Its Moral Fabric?
As we saw in last week’s blog post, Christianity rests on a historical foundation of absolute facts that can be checked out and verified. In previous blogs, we also saw that secularism (a non-religious ideology) grew in dominance in the mid-20th century and gained even more acceptance in the 21st century. It has also become increasingly postmodern in ideology. But has this worldview benefited societies?
The answer is no, and the remaining blogs in this series will demonstrate beyond doubt that not only has secular postmodernism not benefited American and other Western societies but as a worldview is destroying their moral fabric as well. (The topic of this week’s blog.)
Worldview: A philosophy of life and blueprint for living
All worldviews set the moral and social standards by which people in a culture think and behave. To survive, they must possess several necessary ingredients to sustain a healthy, civilized society. One of these is that they must promote moral virtues. History has shown that civilizations that degenerate morally ultimately collapse (see Part One in this series). Is today’s secular postmodern world healthy? No. Consider these statistics from William Bennett’s, The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators, which summarizes the degradation of American’s moral conscience between the 1960s and 2000.
Since 1960, our population has increased 48 percent. But since 1960, even taking into account recent improvements, we have seen a 467 percent increase in violent crime; a 463 percent increase in the numbers of state and federal prisoners; a 461 percent increase in out-of-wedlock births; more than a 200 percent increase in the percentage of children living in single-parent homes; more than a doubling in the teenage suicide rate; a more than 150 percent increase in the number of Americans receiving welfare payments; an almost tenfold increase in the number of cohabiting couples; a doubling of the divorce rate; and a drop of almost 60 points on SAT scores. Since 1973, there have been more than 35 million abortions. (Today, that number has increased to 60,000,000!) (William J. Bennett, The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators; American Society at the end of the 20th Century, 4)
These kinds of statistics give ample evidence that America’s moral health and stability under the flag of secular postmodernism has rapidly declined during the past few decades. It is no coincidence that during the same decades in which Christianity’s influence as the spiritual and moral standard-bearer in American culture declined, America’s moral health deteriorated. In other words, the moral decay in American culture parallels the diminishing influence of the Christian worldview. Remove God from the picture and put people in His place, as secular postmodernism does, and civilization begins to crumble.
There are other ways Christian apologists can demonstrate the irrationality, inconsistencies, and failure of secular postmodernism as a world and life view. We’ll look at five more in the blogs that follow in this series. ©
Next week we’ll see that although many postmodernists claim to be “spiritual,” their ideology—unlike Christianity—provides no legitimate foundation for verifiable religious beliefs.