The Death of Religious Faith

Religious faith has long been an underpinning of the United States. Specific religions have not been endorsed by the government - one of the few cases where government has actually made a feeble attempt to live within the confines of the Constitution - yet rarely have you seen public figures who do not express some type of religious faith.

Faith communities and the acts of charity performed within and by these communities provided societies with a means of caring for the truly destitute or incapable of work; the non-productive through sloth or lack of initiative left to fend for themselves through begging. The Biblical proverb "He who does not work, neither shall he eat" served as a guiding principle. You could not choose to live off the generosity of others.

Yet we do not see this philosophy in play today. Americans remain a tremendously generous people. Yet our religious institutions are no longer the source of charity, nor even so much the basis of community any more as they were in days past.

It is my contention that the death of religious faith and predominance in our communities, with a corresponding decline in publicly enforced morality and standards of behavior, have been driven by and exacerbate an increase in the presence of government in our lives.

Why? When government attempts to dictate and enforce norms of behavior through legislation, bureaucratic decree, taxation, regulations, and the like, it becomes the source of our collective morality, rather than the religious communities in our neighborhoos.

Government, then, as the source of our collective morality, decreed that "the poor" (without discerning the cause of said poverty) deserved our compassion in the form of our collective, forcibly mandated, and inefficiently distributed tax dollars, replacing the religious community approach of knowledge of individual circumstances, judgement of worthiness to receive community charity, and voluntarily given benefit.

As such, government replaced the church and incentivized behavior leading to receipt of government-mandated "charity" for any, including those who chose charity over work due to their own sloth. A sense of entitlement develops - you do not see the individuals who make sacrifices in their own lives to provide the charity you receive when it is merely a government check doled out by a bureacrat you don't know - leading to, not thanks offered to the providers and desire to remove oneself from those handouts, but rather complaints about low (relative) standards of living, complaints about the greed of "the wealthy" / "the rich" being selfish with their blessings.

Behaviors which previously resulted in public shame and thus a desire to turn away from said behaviors - when our religious communities held sway as the focal point of our national morality - are now, if not openly encouraged, are certainly not *discouraged*. Witness the ability of families to receive more government spoils from the raiding of the storehouses of the evil rich should they choose to eschew marriage, to avoid employment, to bring yet more children into the world in those circumstances. How is that benefitting the individuals, the children, or society at large? Do we expect that those children, by and large, will learn to support themselves in any fashion other than what they see from their parent?

In returning to a more accurate following of our Constitution - our contract between grantor citizens and grantee elected officials and their subsidiaries - it is my contention that we will see a revival in our religious communities and a surge in personal responsibility, as irresponsible behavior will no longer be rewarded. It is more difficult to justify receiving charity from your next door neighbor and member of your religious community than it is to justify receiving an entitled standard of living by plundering from the faceless "someone elses" in society.