The WSJ's Daniel Henninger sees the economic crisis as fundamentally a crisis of faith and morals. Excerpt:
What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward.Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of "Merry Christmas."
It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.
The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.
Feel free: Banish Merry Christmas. Get ready for Mad Max.
Well, everybody said "Merry Christmas" back in 1929, and still. But I see his point.
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>> Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.
Where to begin?
1) The US was far less secular in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1894, 1907, and 1929 than it is today, but this did not protect us from devastating financial crises in those years.
2) Is there any evidence that Southern evangelicals took out fewer subprime mortgages, or ran up less credit card debt, than "Northerners and atheists"? Or for that matter that they are less likely to break the law, get divorced, or have children out of wedlock? What exactly are these chalk lines that Northerners and atheists so recklessly abandon?
3) The religious right has had more influence over American politics and culture in the last decade than it's had since they brought us that magnificent example of "useful" evangelical virtue, Prohibition. How has it worked out?
Ah, the good old days, before the earth was overrun with credit-card-toting heathens... You remember them: the days of the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, the summary persecution of Jews, the Holocaust, the enslavement of peoples of color, the genocide of native Americans, the lynch mob, Jim Crow, the heretic burnings, the rack and the screw, the oppression of women, the incarceration of the mentally ill...
Forgive me; I'm in a bit of a rush and can only summon a partial list of the countless atrocities authorized, underwritten, and/or carried out in the name of religious "morality." But I miss the point, no doubt. The point must be that most of these poor unfortunates were financially solvent, and so it must have been a better, morally superior age (and those who weren't solvent were rightly thrown in debtor's prison, where they lived in filth until they caught some hideous disease and died, ever so justly).
At least try making an honest argument, eh? That might be a refreshing way to execute one's "morality."
As I seem to recall, there were some Rs we had rather alot of in public life during this period of. Republicans, for one, and Religious Right people all up in arms and empowered about federal judge appointments, the rights of a woman in a permanent vegetative state, abortion, gay marriage, an angry old black preacher in Chicago, Muslims....
Come to think of it, there probably was a lack of responsibility, restraint and remorse....
Pyrrho, thanks for pointing out that we secular Northeastern's are capable of living upstanding lives.
Ron, your questions and observations are great but don't expect any responses.
Personally I'm annoyed of the secular bogeyman constantly getting the blame around here.
Re: Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.
I see no evidence that Southern Evangelicals are particularly virtuous in financial matters. In fact the infamous Prosperity Gospel ("Name it, claim it") was spawned by these churches, even if most do not espouse it in full form. You really have to look long and hard to find an honest critique of materialism in today's Christianity. Or even the old fashioned sort of Calvinist outlook on such matters. Mammon is alive and well across the whole religious spectrum today.
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