There really is such a thing as right and wrong. And denying that fact has real consequences for society.<\/p>\n
During a recent visit to Swarthmore College, political scientist Robert Putman of Harvard asked everyone in the room whose parents had graduated from college to raise their hands. Not surprisingly, nearly everyone raised their hands.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, the ability to get into elite colleges isn\u2019t the only thing that separates the children of the college-educated from kids whose parents didn\u2019t graduate from college.<\/p>\n
This separation was the subject of a recent New York Times column by David Brooks. In it, Brooks discussed the findings of Putnam\u2019s new book, \u201cOur Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,\u201d and, just as importantly, he discussed how we got to this point.<\/p>\n
As Brooks writes, \u201cIn the 1960s or 1970s, college-educated and noncollege-educated families behaved roughly the same.\u201d Well, not anymore. For instance, college-educated families are more likely to stay together. Brooks writes, only \u201c10 percent of the children born to college grads grow up in single-parent households\u201d while \u201cnearly 70 percent of children born to high school grads do.\u201d That is staggering.<\/p>\n
The divergence in norms between the college-educated and the rest has become so pronounced that, as Brooks puts it, many of Putnam\u2019s graphs \u201clook like open scissors.\u201d<\/p>\n
More eye-opening than any graph are the stories Putnam tells. One young man named \u201cDavid\u201d told Putnam, \u201cI never really got to see my mom that much.\u201d David\u2019s father \u201cdropped out of school … and is now in prison.\u201d As for David himself, he attended \u201cseven different elementary schools … ended up under house arrest, [and] got a girl pregnant before she left him for a drug addict.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brooks is correct when he says that sympathy for these kids, however vital, is not enough. Brooks could have been channeling Chuck Colson when he added that \u201cIt\u2019s not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles; it\u2019s norms.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDavid\u201d is the victim of the fact that \u201cIn many parts of America there are no minimally agreed upon standards for what it means to be a father.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most intriguing is Brooks\u2019 explanation for the absence of those norms and standards: \u201cThey were destroyed by a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another. People got out of the habit of setting standards or understanding how they were set.\u201d<\/p>\n
And the results are all around us.<\/p>\n
Nowhere is \u201cthe cost of relativism\u201d more clearly seen than in crime. Putnam\u2019s \u201cDavid\u201d is hardly unique. That\u2019s why Chuck said that he saw his \u201cwork for Christian worldview to be the natural consequence of [his] work among prisoners.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chuck explained it this way: \u201cDuring the first ten years of Prison Fellowship, I focused on evangelizing prisoners, building discipleship programs, and training volunteers. But I became perplexed that our growing ministry couldn\u2019t keep pace with the nation\u2019s skyrocketing prison populations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then, after some reading and reflection, Chuck realized that \u201cThe surging moral relativism in our culture was eroding our value system.\u201d The denial of right and wrong was being reflected in court dockets.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why Christian worldview is vital to Prison Fellowship\u2019s efforts to this day. As Brooks said, what we need is a \u201cmoral revival.\u201d And that, as Chuck told us, requires \u201c[helping] people begin to see the world through God\u2019s eyes, to see Christian truth in all of life.\u201d<\/p>\n
For \u201cDavid\u2019s\u201d sake as well as our own.<\/p>\n
________<\/p>\n
Copyright (c) 2015 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. “BreakPoint” is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There really is such a thing as right and wrong. And denying that fact has real consequences for society. During a recent visit to Swarthmore College, political scientist Robert Putman of Harvard asked everyone in the room whose parents had graduated from college to raise their hands. Not surprisingly, nearly everyone raised their hands. As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[900,3592,2326,3127,3593,731],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6083"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}