Defend Culture, Defend Freedom

In 1948, I rode city buses downtown to see a movie or just shop. If my parents worried about me, they never said. In those days, I was relatively safe wherever I went, because of a prevailing Judeo-Christian culture.

Church steeples rose above the skyline of city neighborhoods, reminding people of the Ultimate Authority who held everyone accountable for their behavior toward their neighbors. People understood the difference between right and wrong and were expected to act responsibly. Public opinion turned quickly against those who did otherwise. That was sixty years ago.

Culture, Robert Louis Wilken writes, is "the pattern of inherited meanings and sensibilities encoded in rituals, law, language, practices, and stories that order, inspire, and guide the behavior, thoughts and affections" of a people. Pulitzer Prize-winning author, David Mamet, put it another way. "The culture of a country, a family, a religion, a region, is a compendium of unwritten laws worked out over time through the preconscious adaptations of its members…through trial and error."

A culture develops over time through public consensus. In colonial America, that consensus was rooted in the moral codes of the Bible. By the mid-twentieth century, one did not need to be intimately acquainted with the Bible to participate in the American culture. The Bible's social instructions had been incorporated within families and into "the way things were done," that is, customs, habits, and manners. Unfortunately, this is no longer true.

Tradition is another word for "culture." The traditions held by families, communities, and nations express the culture that holds social relationships together. Change the traditions of a people, and their culture, their way of life, is changed.

When a culture is challenged to change, the proposed changes must be tested over time and accepted to avoid conflict. In a free society, change imposed by governing authority is usually unwelcome. What are we to do then, when traditions and ultimately our culture are challenged to change, as they are today?

Consider. The destruction of a nation is not so much about the overthrow of its government as it is destroying the nation's culture.

Cultural patterns are assimilated from a variety of sources beginning with one's family, its values, ethnic and religious traditions. Subsequently, familial patterns may be supplemented and modified by various local, regional, and national patterns. These patterns are "enculturated" into a person's core self, forming non-negotiable values.

Consider. America's prevailing Judeo-Christian culture is threatened from within when parental authority is rendered irrelevant and replaced by a secular government whose "establishment culture" is taught in public schools.

Our nation was formed on the principles and values of a family-centered, Judeo-Christian culture rooted in the texts of the Bible. Our nation's "rule of law" is based on the commands of the Judeo-Christian God known as the Ten Commandments, field-tested for millennia, elaborated in the teachings of the New Testament, and found to be essential to mutually beneficial relationships regardless of religious beliefs.

For generations, Americans have been relatively safe in their streets and homes because of this culture. We should be concerned, therefore, why this is less true today than it was sixty years ago. The culture that once prevailed in America is being torn down by secularists, who have been essentially unchallenged by Christians and Jews.

If Christians and Jews do not come out from behind the walls of their churches and synagogues to publicly defend America's Judeo-Christian culture from the changes of progressive secularism, the weak and defenseless will not be safe in the streets and the freedoms we cherish will disappear.