If we have full employment and growth–if we have cities of gold and alabaster — but our children have not learned to walk in goodness, justice and mercy, then the American experiment, no matter how gilded, will have failed. In modernity, nothing has been more consequential, or more public in its consequences, than large segments of American society privately turning away from God, or considering Him irrelevant, or declaring Him dead. Dostoyevsky reminded us in Brothers Karamazov that “if God does not exist, everything is permissible.” We are now seeing “everything.” And much of it is not good to get used to.

— William J. Bennett, The Washington Times