Ed Vitagliano
AFA Journal news editor
October 2002 – It was a mixed bag of results for Big Brothers Big Sisters of America (BBBSA). The announcement by the 98-year-old organization that it would forbid local affiliates to “discriminate” against homosexual mentors for children sent shockwaves through churches and pro-family groups. For the rest of the culture, however, it was barely even a blip on the screen of important and relevant issues.
BBBSA carries out its mission touching the lives of 220,000 youth through its child-adult mentorships via more than 490 local affiliates. However, along with other youth-oriented organizations like the Girl Scouts USA and YWCA of America, BBBSA seems to have embraced homosexuality as natural and normal. (See story here.)
Public opinion about the subject of homosexuality makes it clear that America is in the midst of a radical shift. While there is no polling data on the current controversy revolving around the BBBSA’s decision, there is some evidence to point to the fact that most Americans are losing their uneasiness about allowing children to interact with homosexuals.
For example, 25 years ago a Gallup Poll asked people if they thought homosexuals should be employed as elementary school teachers. Only 27% said yes, while 65% were opposed.
In 1992, however, Gallup found that those numbers had begun to take a different tack: 41% of respondents said they thought it was OK if homosexuals were hired as elementary school teachers; 54% were opposed. By 2001 – less than 10 years later – the polling data revealed an almost exact switch in position: 56% were in favor, 40% against.
Underlying moral ambivalence
A change of this magnitude – in such a short span of time – suggests that something akin to a moral revolution is occurring in our country. Few would argue with that assessment.
Some might say that these radical changes in morality are simply because many Americans are adopting postmodernism – i.e., moral relativism – as their philosophy of life. However, that is simply another characterization of what is happening, not why.
Others might see the problem as simple apathy – that Americans have just stopped caring about questions of morality. Gertrude Himmelfarb, Professor Emeritus at City University in New York, argues in her book One Nation, Two Cultures that such (usually downward) changes in the moral environment occur as wealth increases in democratic, capitalistic nations. The very prosperity produced by a capitalistic nation eventually leads to self-indulgence – and a “live and let live” moral framework that lets you have your self-indulgence and lets me have mine.
However, surveys actually appear to demonstrate the opposite: most Americans really do care about morality. Americans seem to have an intrinsic awareness that things are not quite right morally, and despite the current emphasis on “tolerance,” most people prefer a return to “traditional values.”
The problem, then, is not that Americans don’t care about morality, but that they are conflicted over which morality to choose. The heart of our culture’s moral crisis seems to be rooted, not in apathy, but moral ambivalence.
Survey results demonstrate this equivocation, sometimes producing mind-boggling paradoxes about what Americans actually believe. For example, poll after poll consistently reveals that an overwhelming majority of Americans think there is too much sex, profanity and violence on television. Yet Americans are watching more TV than ever – and many of the most popular shows on network and cable television contain the most objectionable material.
On hot-button social issues, the results also appear less than definitive. While 47% of Americans call themselves “pro-choice,” only 38% believe abortion is “morally acceptable.” And while an overwhelming majority of Americans (82%) think homosexuals and heterosexuals should be treated equally, only 34% believe homosexuals should be allowed to legally marry.
From paradox to paralysis
These paradoxes may be explained as a peculiar American double-mindedness about moral values. There are, in effect, two powerful moral magnetic poles in operation – both equally strong and both exerting influence on American mores – that at times make our beliefs appear contradictory. One pole reflects a still existent, though perhaps fading allegiance to traditional morality, and the other a distinct – and perhaps distinctly American – ethic that is firmly wed to the concept of libertarian individualism.
In his book One Nation, After All, Boston University sociologist Alan Wolfe seems to suggest this dual-track moral impulse. After interviewing 200 people in Massachusetts, Oklahoma, California and Georgia, he discovered that the American middle class, while generally strict on themselves morally, has added an 11th commandment: “Thou shalt not judge” other people’s actions.
Himmelfarb points to the same trends in American culture, saying that most people shrink from appearing judgmental. She said, “They habitually take refuge in such equivocations as ‘Who is to say what is right or wrong?’ or ‘Personally, I disapprove of pornography, but that is only my own opinion.’”
However, the problem with such ambivalence is that it produces moral paralysis. America is becoming less able – and perhaps even less willing – to form a consistent view concerning moral principles.
At the same time, this inertia has a more libertine, hedonistic morality to gain the upper hand by default. After all, if Americans refuse to call someone’s actions immoral, then by default those actions must be moral – actions cannot be immoral and moral at the same time.
The flourishing values of relativism, once entrenched, will become extremely difficult to challenge, let alone overthrow. Any conservative Christian who has attempted to make a difference on a college or university campus, or in the news media or entertainment industry, could attest to that reality of life.
The church: A city set on a hill
For Christians, our nation’s moral confusion is a painful, discouraging fact. Yet God has charged the church and given it the grace to bring His truth to pagan cultures. It has always been this way. Our culture – because it appears to be rushing back to Western Civilization’s pagan roots – needs the church to stand for the truth.
“You are the light of the world,” Jesus told His disciples in the Sermon on the Mount. Men do not “light a lamp, and put it under the peck-measure, but on the lampstand; and it gives light to all who are in the house,” (Matthew 5:14f.).
Light is frequently used in Scripture to denote the spiritual truth of God and His word, and here it is used of that calling of individual Christians to demonstrate God’s light to the surrounding culture.
However, Jesus also uses an example that has a more corporate sense: “A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” Such a city is seen for miles around, and its illumination can not only guide weary travelers to hearth and home but keep them from stumbling in the darkness to their own destruction.
Surely this is a reflection of the church’s duty in a dark world. Collectively, as a community of faithful disciples, the church is to show fallen man how God intends men to live. As “the pillar and support of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15), the Christian community is to pattern life in God’s kingdom “in order that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3:10); and, as Jesus said in Matthew 5:16, to “men.”
This addresses the heart of the problem our culture faces at this critical moment. Under the laws of men, the BBBSA has the freedom to pair children with homosexual mentors; but that is far from saying it has the right to do so before the laws of God. Yet, our culture reflexively asks, who is to say what is right and what is wrong?
The church is to say it! The church must rise to the occasion and present a clear message of the absolute and eternal validity of God’s laws, the rightful place of those laws in ordering the affairs of men, and the power of the gospel to transform sinful men so that they can obey Him.
It appears the church is either ignorant of this responsibility or negligent in it. In fact, Wolfe said what surprised him in his research was how ambivalent American Christianity had become. In discussions with Christians in Tulsa suburbs, for example, Wolfe said believers were not comfortable “in expressing themselves in the language of absolutes.” He said that even Christians are being influenced by a new moral code that promotes relativism and tolerance. Research on American Christianity by George Barna demonstrates the same impotence.
Compare such a sad state with the passionate words of Paul, that “we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were entreating through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God,” (2 Corinthians 5:20). Christians must not only proclaim the offer of reconciliation, but also the need for it.
There are some Christians who are doing exactly as Paul says, but far too many who are not. If the church is pleading with the world’s people to be reconciled to God – with the same passion as if it were God Himself entreating them – it is difficult to see.
A church that is unwilling to make that proclamation of grace – or because of compromise, unable to make it – has covered its light under a basket. It has ceased being a city set on a hill, and instead become a dark star, which not only fails to emit light but sucks in all the light around it.
God will have His light, however. Perhaps it will yet shine through our generation. Perhaps it will await a more faithful generation to come. 
Ed Vitagliano is the pastor of Harvester Church in Pontotoc, Mississippi, as well as the news editor of AFA Journal.
