We return on this Page to a very important theme: Values. Each year the Minneapolis Star-Tribune publishes a supplement on the best companies in the state to work for. It is an excellent and somewhat extensive narrative about the treatment of employees, and the consequence for the business relating to the values of the various companies, owners, and employees of the winning corporations. Don MacPherson, president of the Modern Survey stated: Our research has found that employees who know and understand their organization’s values are 30 times more likely to be fully engaged than someone who works at an organization without values or who is unaware of the organization’s values. We have found that having values makes full engagement possible and the absence of values makes full engagement nearly impossible. (Minneapolis Star-Tribune – Top Workplaces – June 16, 2013)
One of the main burdens carried by these Pages is to argue for values, as a prevailing factor in nearly all the scope and context of human life and the management of society and nature. It would be difficult to over-emphasize the point. It is a total anomaly to those of my shared persuasion that children are raised without learning about the range of human values, and the wisdom of adopting the affirmative ones. The omission from some parents is underlined, even sometimes accented, in the dropping away of effective formal education in a value system that offers the greatest good to the greatest number of persons. The standard has become casual. No lines hold. Margins are pushed. The evidence is emerging in such statistics as those students educated in business have more than doubled in the last decade related to the number choosing to engage in money management so to gain the exorbitant salaries allotted to the financial markets. Analysts suggest that the motivation has dwindled from production and service goals to those that focus on money and property. Materialism that has been growing since the Civil War has now blossomed so may counter any other value that might vie for first place. Serving the market and meeting needs has not grown out of an idealism that serves the needs of all people, but to meet needs (and more) as long as profit is available. Equity for human beings is lost as seen in the growing division between the haves and the have-nots. The length of time given to the job may be extending, at a cost to family and community life. Distortions seem to be growing, and there is a general milieu that has taken our people.
We emphasize, as Christians, that values come from God even when the values are cloaked in non-religious terms. Christians talk about serving mankind: idealistic humanists talk about giving something back. Christians are committed to fidelity in marriage, which broken may permit divorce. Idealistic humanists hold similar ideals with larger permit for divorce. Christians talk about honesty and personal responsibility: humanists talk about integrity. They include the same factors. The measure of spiritual values with secular values in the affirmations of the better human character relate well. References to love and peace motives are shared by both theists and atheists. Value concepts held by Christians serve well all persons who follow them. Those values are not to be cherry-picked so to select some and reject others, or to so amend them that they no longer hold force. Mark Noll, the Christian historian, noted that a big modern break with Christian values began with the varieties of interpretations by Christians north and south relative to slavery. If the values of freedom and equality, so conflicted north and south in interpretation of Scripture, can be made to be contradictory, why should we continue the Christian ethical and value system?
Scriptural unity has been sacrificed for self-interest and private interpretation, and the force of Scripture meaning has declined. The problem is not with Scripture, but with interpreters in private interpretation. Failure ascribed to marriage is not in marriage but in the persons violating marriage. We are called to greater objectivity than has been demonstrated in the current age. Violations do not determine principles. Varieties of religious experience now available to the public will not serve final resolution. They are commonly taken as self-oriented in humanistic context – without God. A celebrity has recently sought spiritual support through an ancient Indian technique in astrology – to justify her divorce battle. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020