Immoral times

A claim I often see from some of the more out-there religious wingnuts is that since abandoning Christianity as its cultural center, "kicking God out of the schools", etc, the US has been sinking ever deeper into immorality, and that indeed today our society is less moral than it has ever been.  What they're referring to, of course, is the prevalence of taboo violations such as abortion and same-sex marriage; occasionally they also mention a perceived high level of violent crime, exemplified by mass shootings and urban rioting.

This suggests a very warped concept of morality, or perhaps a deep historical blindness, or both.

By far the worst immoralities in American history were slavery and the Indian genocide.  Nothing that is happening in the country today even remotely compares to these evils.  To suggest that letting two men get married represents a deeper level of depravity than the generations of forced labor, mass rape, family separation, and all the other atrocities of slavery is not just wrong -- it's ludicrous, utterly insane.  It is also silly, by the way, to claim that historians will judge Trump to be the worst president in US history.  Bad as he was, nothing he did stands on the same plane of evil as Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830, which launched the ethnic cleansing of the Indian peoples of the southeast, under conditions which made huge numbers of deaths in transit inevitable -- strikingly similar to the Ottomans' Armenian genocide of almost a century later.  Nothing in America's present matches the horrors of its past.

More recent periods have manifested intermediate evils.  The age of segregation and lynchings and Jim Crow, and the conscription which forced hundreds of thousands of men to go fight a war in Vietnam even after the government knew it was unwinnable, leading to the deaths and maiming of tens of thousands (and of far more Vietnamese), were less evil than slavery, but still far more evil than anything happening here today.

As for the mass shootings and riots, the US through its history has followed the same pattern as other developed countries, with crime rates generally falling over time, except for parts of the twentieth century (surges in crime during the 1900s-1930s and the 1960s-1990s, declining otherwise).  Even with the recent spike in violent crime due to the stresses of the pandemic, lockdowns, and economic upheaval, today's overall murder rate, despite mass shootings, is lower than most earlier periods of US history.  Urban riots, too, were worse in the 1960s than today.  Mass shootings and riots are a serious problem and we as a country need to take action to suppress them, but it is simply false to claim that they represent a historically-unusual high level of violence.  The truth is the opposite.

It is certainly true that the US was more religious in earlier times.  The slave-owners and Indian-killers were out-and-proud Christians, who often used the Bible to justify their actions -- and with good reason.  The Bible accepts slavery as normative, and is full of stories of God himself ordering acts of what we today would call genocide or ethnic cleansing.  The Trail of Tears and the slave economy of the old South are exactly what you would expect to see in any society which took the Bible as the basis of its morality.

One can see the same pattern by comparing contemporary societies.  The most religious parts of the US, such as the deep South, have much higher rates of violent crime and other social pathologies than the least-religious parts, such as New England and the Pacific Northwest.  The most secular part of the old Christian world, western Europe, has far less violence and inequality than the US, while the most religious part, Latin America, has far more.

Modern America has problems, but our turning away from religion is not part of the disease.  It's part of the cure.