Three Cheers For Our "Inevitable" Decline!

When I was on the road as a religious right sidekick to my evangelist father (Francis Schaeffer) in the 1970s and 80s Dad and I did what all religious right leaders did back then: We predicted social breakdown and doom unless America "returned to God."
I'm long since out of the Back-to-the-Bible business and have written books like Crazy For God explaining why I got out. But little has changed. Today religious leaders from the Roman Catholic bishops to the evangelicals not to mention many a Republican running for office are still pitching the old God or Doom "choice." 
Our somewhat gleeful pitch went something like this: "With the loss of Christian absolutes our formerly Christian nation turned away from God so social chaos will engulf our country. With the sexual revolution we see family breakdown, the rise of gay 'rights' and the rise of family-destroying feminism. The result will be increased crime, a collapsing economy and the loss of our place in the world."
I could quote literally thousands of silly evangelical right wing religious leaders (including me!) making this sort of prediction. Here is the typical doom mantra as expressed by one of my late father's followers and most avid imitators, evangelical guru Os Guinness: from his book No God but God/Breaking With the Idols of Our Age:

"The American republic is nearing the climax of a generation-long crisis of cultural authority that calls into question it's very character and strength. The problem is not simply 'out there' – in either such obvious problems as drugs and crime or such common explanations as the influence of family breakdown, moral relativism, secularism, neo-paganism, and the New Age Movement. Nor is the crisis of cultural authority simply a matter of the 'culture wars'…. Instead, American beliefs, ideals and tradition - civic as well as religious – are losing their compelling power to shape and restrain lives in both the private and public spheres."

We would point to crime rates in New York City in the late 1970s as "proof" of what was about to happen to the whole country. And we'd point out that it was no wonder New York was such a dangerous place given that it was so secularized. Our thinking was that only a conservative lifestyle what we called "family values" could produce social stability. We attributed the very rule of law to our white middle class Protestant values.
So 30 years-plus down the historical road how did our certainties about decline and doom work out?
Well, following our logic there must have been a fundamentalist revival and reformation in New York City! How else could we have explained the huge drop in crime? And since US productivity has steadily increased at the same time as divorce rates went up and gays came out of the closet these divorced and gay Americans all must have secretly accepted Jesus!
Otherwise how could the Godless "they" have become the most productive, crime free and peaceful Americans in history?
In fact the very opposite of the social breakdown we predicted has happened. Those Godless abortion-loving, philandering, divorced gay New Yorkers and other Americans in most urban areas are experiencing the lowest crime rates in almost half a century. And when they go to work it is as part of the most productive generation in American history. And this is at the very time evangelicals are losing their influence over the country. (They backed Rick Santorum and that's not working out too well not to mention that their own young people are leaving their churches in droves and are mostly as pro-gay rights as most other Americans.)
And if anyone is crazy enough to attack us our mighty unparalleled military -- full of gays and women – can exact terrible retribution around the globe.
Moreover the greatest creative leap forward in human history since the Renaissance   – the invention of the internet and everything that goes with it – is the creation of post-hippie Godless America.
Sure we have big problems, but here's the point: Not one of our actual problems has anything to do with what we said would happen. In fact the opposite is true. Our problems relate directly to the activities of often conservative religious people and their ideas. Global warming, the fact that Jim Crow is alive and well in our new American apartheid system directed against our mostly incarcerated black male population, the war on women by Roman Catholic bishops and Republican evangelicals… these things come from the heart of the conservative ethos.
It is the Jewish/Christian belief in the exploitation of nature that has led to global warming. It is the race-baiting conservatives using the Bible as their guide that has kept racism alive here. It is the evangelical/Roman Catholic belief that the misogynistic Bible is literally true that has kept the anti-woman agenda alive and the gay bashing going.
Our most pressing problems can be fairly laid at the door of conservative favorites from corporate American capitalist greed, to right wing think tanks and political leaders and the neo conservatives who have done so much to abuse our military and reduce our international prestige by goading us into one useless war after another. And meanwhile corporations and billionaires have been freed to wreak havoc on our political system by a Republican conservative Supreme Court. 
America has yet to "turn back to the Bible." The decline (as Guinness put it) where "American beliefs, ideals and tradition - civic as well as religious – are losing their compelling power to shape and restrain lives in both the private and public spheres" continues.
And we're doing just fine. Three cheers for our "decline!"


Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of Crazy For God. He is on an extended speaking tour and may be contacted to book him for speaking engagements at Frankschaeffer.com