Counsel For Understanding

This is being written in early January, 2014.  On checking the news I found an article entitled: CNN Morality Poll Reveals Surprising Trends in America.  The Poll is a follow-up of a Time Magazine poll taken in 1987, and includes that poll’s results as part of current reporting.  I was drawn to the report for several reasons: I retired as President of Simpson College (now University) in California in 1987 on the edge of my 65^th birthday, and will turn 91 this first month in January 2014, the year date for this follow-up poll; I am intensely interested in morality, personal and social; and, I have been working on the uses of what constitutes pertinent evidence in discussions about life belief and conduct that leads to truthful conclusions. The span of the period covered by the reports is a span constituting nearly a third of my lifetime, but short in the illusions of history.  First we look at the results of the polls as published.  We are encouraged at the outset in that the Pew organization is credited with having made the poll, perhaps in response to a sponsor.

What do these statistics offer us?  The answer depends upon what the reader is looking for.  Does a poll provide right and wrong in belief and conduct?  If it does do we take the one from 1967, or the one from 2014?  Does morality change from generation to generation?  Was slavery wrong when the majority of citizens believed it to be right and right when another majority believed it to be wrong?  What does this evidence show?  It may show that public opinion is moving toward pluralism in that which is generally taken as social, and excusing self in that which is interpreted as personal (private). The biblical morality of sex outside marriage, and duty to government in tax programming is holding in belief even if not in practice.  It informs the Christian student of human belief and conduct that although half of the American population consider themselves to follow a degree of the Christian faith, the statistics do not represent a consistent pattern of biblical morality.  The figures show that the moral level of the nation has been loosened markedly in some factors in one generation.  Following biblical morality such shifts would not take place.  The shifting shows that mankind, not God, is presumed to set the moral standard. The literature commonly identifies objections to current factors now approved in the majority as phobias so implying the objections reflect immorality, a change in one generation from morality to immorality.  It is a violation of the reality of values as significant to the life and solidarity of persons in a culture.  We learn from some evidence, not what ought to be, but what is.  When we know what is we have duty to proclaim what ought to be.  Right and wrong became identifying factors in the Adam/Eve family.  There is right and wrong identified in actual results, not polls.  Righteousness is not a mystery.  It reflects the holiness of God.