Hilton Head Island, SC – October 22, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Hosea 3:1-3,15-19; Jeremiah 8:8-13
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not ashamed; they did not know how to blush.” – Jeremiah 8:12
American culture is in decline. Anyone who does not recognize that is probably not yet old enough to observe the decline. The rest of us can certainly see it if we dare to look.
Does that mean that the United States of America is in decline? That might also be true, but that is not the subject of this sermon. I am referring here only to American culture.
What does the word “culture” mean? Cultivation of soil for farming or the cultivation of “taste” in art or literature are examples, but these are not applicable to our sermon theme for today. The kind of “culture” that I believe we need to be concerned about is sociological and behavioral. How do we live out our lives in community? How do we behave? What do we deem to be acceptable behavior? Are there boundaries beyond which we, as a culture, must not go?
The dictionary definition of culture at which we shall be looking is this, or at least something like this: culture is “the art of developing the intellectual and moral faculties, especially by education.” The cultivation of exemplary culture is an art. It doesn’t just happen; it takes years and decades and centuries of concerted endeavor. Furthermore, culture has to be developed; it never occurs instantaneously or without careful effort. We need to be educated about what we can and cannot do if we want to be civilized citizens in our society. Proper acculturation requires the intellectualization of what is right and what is wrong, and that requires moral and ethical internalization. We must construct a good culture and then work hard to keep it going.
After that highfalutin academic introduction, let me tell you what I think are some of the things all of us should be concerned about. Really atrocious and profane language. A decline in cultural refinement and an unquestioning acceptance of that decline. Clothes that are ultra-revealing or purposefully grungy or completely lacking in decorum. Growing disrespect for others and for oneself. Majoring in minors and minoring in majors. Spending too much time on things that don’t matter and spending too little time on what really matters. Putting up with coarseness because we are too preoccupied with other things to address this alarming issue.
A while back a list was publicized of the top ten money-making films of the previous two or three months. Nine of them were fantasy sci-fi computer-generated entertainment drivel. Only one, Dunkirk, was a serious film dealing with a serious moment in recent history. Are movies worth making with multiple alien invasions or herculean good-guy-bad-guy confrontations or cartoon characters with voices that sound familiar to us? They seem to be the only movies worth making if moviemakers only want to make money. But isn’t cinema supposed to be an art, a genuine art? Isn’t it called The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? Contemporary movies are engorged with computerized science, but where is the art in the plot? And is there a plot at all? Movies should be a good reflection of art and culture, not a crass fiscal enterprise.
This may sound like a geezer ranting at the world because he is a geezer and therefore too old to be “with it” any longer. Actually it may be that, and not just sound like it. But should geezers be the only ones alarmed at how raw and uncultured our culture has become? It is like John Adams, plaintively crying out in the Broadway musical 1776, but with a different twist from what Sherman Edwards, the composer and lyricist, intended: “Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see?” The Broadway Adams foresaw the birth of a new nation, but we may be seeing the unraveling of a by-now relatively well-established culture, at least historically.
What is going on in our culture has gone on many times before in other cultures. The glory of Greek democracy in the sixth century BCE catapulted into chaos in the wars between Athens and Sparta in later centuries. The grandeur of the Roman Republic slipped into the vicious carnage of imperial Roman excesses. The magnificence of the Ottoman Empire slowly seeped into a rancid, sex-crazed Turkish state, dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century by a zealous secularist who called himself Ataturk. The Land of Hope and Glory that was Victorian Britain eventually lost its moral fiber, fighting too many major wars with too little ethical ammunition.
It is really hard for any culture to maintain moral strength indefinitely. As William Butler Yeats said, “Things fall apart/ The center cannot hold/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Why? Often, perhaps even always, it happens because culture coarsens, standards loosen, people are so preoccupied with personal minutiae or by insisting on looking the other way so that they do not notice how sordid the world has become. They care more about themselves than one another.
Jesus may have lived in such a time. Certainly the prophets Hosea and Jeremiah did. Hosea lived in Israel about 750 BCE, and Jeremiah lived in Judah about a hundred and fifty years later. Listen first to Hosea. “There is no faithfulness or kindness….There is swearing, lying, killing, stealing, and committing adultery….Like a stubborn heifer, Israel is stubborn; can the Lord now feed them like a lamb in a broad pasture?” (Hosea 3:1,2,16) The Israelites had had an admirable culture, because they tried to live by God’s laws, laws which are intended to establish dignity and respect for all people. Hosea believed all that had vanished in a cultural collapse. Within a few years of his saying that, Israel itself collapsed, as the Assyrians came and conquered them.
Jeremiah was a prophet even more dismayed by his fellow Jews in Judah, and his message was one of despair for the future. “How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us’? But, behold the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie. The wise men shall be put to shame, they shall be dismayed and taken….Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush” (8:8,9,12). A few years after Jeremiah said that, Jerusalem and Judah were conquered by the Babylonians.
When is the last time you saw anyone blush? Think about it. A blush occurs when people know they have committed a terrible social faux pas, or have said something very inappropriate. There is an instantaneous emotional response, as blood rushes to the cheeks. Are there any “false steps” anymore, a faux pas, or can we now do whatever we please? Is anything now inappropriate? Seventy years ago, when I was a boy, or fifty years ago when I was a young man, children and adults regularly blushed, because they felt they had done things about which they could not avoid blushing. Now you almost never see a blush. American culture has coarsened that much in that short a span, and that should give us all serious pause.
In the time we have left, let us look at illustrations of three specific kinds of cultural decline. They are the widespread use of foul language, widespread male sexual abuse of others, and a widely accepted coarseness in our politics.
Foul Language has no doubt existed as long as human beings have been utilizing language to communicate with one another. I won’t even try to define “foul;” you know what it means. Profanity has always existed. The third commandment, “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain,” was an example of that. However, while we consider that to be “swearing,” there are many other examples of swearing, though I shall refrain from listing any of them; you are very familiar with them. If you didn’t hear foul words fifty years ago, you certainly hear or read them now - - - ubiquitously, frequently, and in all the media.
It is the prevalence and persistence and acceptance of foul language that is so appalling. I suspect many of us say words we dared not say several decades ago, but we say them now, because, as children and other immature people say, “Everybody does it!” Not everybody does it, but far too many do, and it illustrates one of the most glaring examples of cultural coarsening. Many comedians on late-night television use atrocious language. A few Oscar winners at the Academy Awards show use words they know are inappropriate. Many characters in many movies seem destined by the screenwriters to be scripted to say countless four-letter words. Even news commentators on television news shows use what heretofore was always considered to be profanity. The New Yorker regularly prints foul language without blank spaces; The New Yorker!
We used to have laws that prevented use of such language in public. Civil libertarians, unsavory individuals, and ill-educated, uncultured people have unwisely eradicated those laws without thinking through why they were enacted in the first place. Laws cannot guarantee cultured language, but cultural mores should be in effect which constrain the usage of inappropriate language in public discourse. We should know better. But it seems that we don’t know any longer what we ought to know, internally, in our inner social conscience.
Foul language is both an effect and a cause of cultural coarsening, as is male sexual abuse and the coarsening of politics. In 1964 Barry Goldwater said, “You can’t legislate morality,” and he was right. Nevertheless, morality must be taught and valued and continuously strengthened, or a culture runs a great risk of experiencing its own calamitous moral decline. The almost universal acceptance of foul language is simply not acceptable. We have created a verbal cesspool.
Male sexual abuse may be no more widespread now than it was fifty or a hundred or two hundred or a thousand years ago, but we know far more about its prevalence because of the media than we knew previously. Back then, it was all covered up. Now it is front-and-center.
One of the two most horrible examples of this horrendous phenomenon that we now know about is pedophile clergy. From what I have read, this apparently has been very quietly acknowledged and written about forever, but nothing was ever done about it. This behavior was so noxious, so evil, that it was thought inadvisable even to bring the issue into public awareness. And thus countless millions of lives over many centuries have been secretly destroyed by this pathological aberration. The Church, any Church, every Church, THE Church, should always have defrocked such clergy, but they didn’t. Invariably it contributed to the coarsening of every society where clerical pedophilia was allowed to continue, which was virtually everywhere.
Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilley, Bill Cosby, and Bill Clinton are infamous illustrations of another facet of a tragic coarsening of our culture. Thinking it is best to keep the lid on male sexual abuse, legal, political, and social conservatives have done all they could to prevent these kinds of abuses from falling under public scrutiny. After all, as they say, “Boys will be boys.” Boys may be boys, but men don’t abuse --- anyone, under any circumstances. If they do, they inevitably contribute to a culture in steady decline.
Though it may not be apparent to most Americans, politics is where our culture illustrates its deepest, most threatening wounds. The amount of money spent to elect public officials at all levels of government is truly appalling. On a per capita basis, it may be more expensive to run for the town council of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, than for the United States Congress, Senate, or Presidency. (I doubt, however, the same could be said of Hardeeville, Ridgeland, or even Beaufort.) As has often been noted, especially in the last few decades, the founding fathers of this nation never intended for there to be any lifelong elected politicians. Politics was expected to be a gentleman’s short-term pursuit (emphasize gentleman), but not a lifetime vocation. Nevertheless, we have thousands of national, state, and local legislators who spend billions of their own and constituents’ dollars to remain in office indefinitely. It is a scandal, but it also shows how crass and coarse our culture has become. Professional politicians are a plague.
And that brings us to Donald J. Trump. I shall refer here only to Mr. Trump’s coarse behavior, not to his politics. However, if you think you might have a stroke or heart attack immediately if you don’t leave immediately, then I suggest you leave now. I am truly, deadly serious. I am going to enumerate examples of our President’s ultra-coarse behavior, but only that, and not his political shortcomings. Mr. Trump, more than any other American individual, has done more in two and a half years to undermine American culture than any hundred or thousand such men put together could ever have managed to accomplish in the past.
A minority of the American electorate, by a terrible but totally legal injustice made possible by a badly flawed United States Constitution, elected a man who obviously was and is and always shall be a narcissistic obvious charmer-of-millions. Still, we knew he used disgustingly raunchy language. We knew he was a womanizer. We knew he abused women. We knew he lied. We knew he played fast and loose with other people’s money, but apparently not with his own. We knew he was utterly unqualified for the highest office in the land, let alone for any other political office, but we elected him anyway. How could we have allowed ourselves to do that? We did it because too many of us have become almost as crude as he is.
Mr. Trump’s assault on American cultural refinement is truly incalculable. I said at the beginning of the sermon that this is not about America, but rather about American culture. Both America and American culture shall survive Donald Trump, but no one can say how long that will be. My primary point here is about cultural coarseness. Our President has coarsened us immensely in eighteen months of campaigning and in less than one year in office.
The most astonishing feature to me about the continuing support for Mr. Trump is that of evangelical Christians. Evangelicals have been admired for their commitment to righteousness. However, surveys showed that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Mr. Trump. In light of his multiple major behavioral failings, made public throughout the presidential campaign, it is amazing that self-professed Christians can still support him. He is as obvious an example of a “clear and present danger” as has ever existed in any culture. Anybody who is not ashamed of Donald Trump’s behavior is not wearing moral blinders, but instead has placed an enormous black hood over his head. I know this will anger some of you, and enrage a few of you, but if you do not recognize the detestable coarseness of this man’s behavior and completely indefensible actions, and disavow it, you have allowed yourself to be swept into a cultural malaise from which we, as a people, might never recover. God help us! I cannot be more serious. God, help us!
If American culture goes down the drain, America goes down the drain. We have experienced many major crises before. We are in the midst of another one. If we get our act together, we can survive. I can’t preach this sermon to America. I can only preach it to you. Please consider whatever you personally can do to ease the coarseness of our culture. Please. God help us.