Part One: Why Secularism and Relativism are  Destroying the Moral Fabric of America

Perhaps the simplest way to respond to moral relativism, as well as to the whole secular/postmodern worldview, is to demonstrate that it is destroying the moral fabric of America.

A worldview is not just a philosophy of life; it’s a blueprint for living. It sets the moral and social standards by which people in a culture largely think and behave. All worldviews must possess several necessary ingredients if they are to sustain a healthy, civilized society. One of these is that it must promote moral virtues. History has shown that civilizations that degenerate morally ultimately collapse. Is today’s secular world healthy? Consider these statistics from William Bennett’s, The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators: American Society at the End of the Twentieth Century:

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 [60] million abortions. (p. 4)

These statistics are around twenty years old; one can only imagine how worse many of them will be today. Abortion, for example, has nearly doubled since Bennett’s research, from 35 million to 60 million—enough dead babies to repopulate the entire west coast of America, including Alaska. My point is these statistics give ample evidence that America’s moral stability under the flag of secularism has rapidly declined during the past few decades.

It is no coincidence that during the same four decades in which the influence of Christianity in America declined, the moral health of America has deteriorated. The moral decay in American culture parallels the diminishing influence of the Christian worldview and its role as the moral standard-bearer in society. Remove God from the picture and put people in His place, as secular humanism does, and civilization crumbles.

Christian apologists can prove this. A wealth of up-to-date figures are available on the Internet, in journals, and in books that provide ample data to support the argument that America, like previous civilizations, may be moving closer to moral collapse because society as a whole has rejected Biblical values and principles. ©