There is a brick office building near my home with a simple, square design giving it the appearance of being sturdy and well grounded. It isn’t. Its foundation has fractured and can no longer support the structure above it. Multiple large cracks now run through its mortared walls opening fissures to the elements of nature. The building has lost it structural integrity and can no longer perform its basic task of protecting the interior from exterior assaults. 

Countries have foundations, too. Arguably, ours is the Constitution of the United States. It is the first governing document to be written by representatives of the people to be governed and to be applied only after central agreement had been achieved. That Constitution was arrived at through compromise. How was that possible? What were the social and ethical foundations underlying that compromise? The answer is important because while the founders could provide the country with a government structure, they could not provide the enduring social ethics needed to keep it. That would have to come from the people, themselves.

The ethical understandings of our Founders’ time were primarily those from western Europe as sieved through the experience of Great Britain. Some of those understandings were that government would have a representative assembly, that the judiciary would be independent of government influence, that basic individual rights would be respected in the law, and that religious toleration was preferable to religious war. All of that had been learned through a millennium and a half of British experience primarily under the ethical influence of Christianity. In the United States, that long history had led to a largely Protestant form of the religion, which for over 250 years has informed not only the established laws of the country, but its accepted social constraints, as well. Its influence regarding individual responsibility, respect for law, and consideration of others were foundational to the democracy designed by our Founders and have remained important to its maintenance by the people. 

Despite that reality, over the last half-century main-stream Protestantism has merged more with secular society and lost much of its cultural clout. This has occurred despite an attempt by conservative Protestantism to become more politically active and wield influence in local and national elections. Both liberal and conservative Protestantism seem to have forgotten that Christianity was meant to be counter-cultural, to be an influence on culture rather than to be influenced by it. That forgetting is a sad failure of the religion. 

Jonathan Rauch, a self-proclaimed Jewish atheist, studies the interaction of government and culture. In his book, “Cross Purposes,” he observes that a healthy Christianity has always been the main underpinning of American society. He says the U. S.’s largely Protestant Christianity has now lost its persuasive powers and that loss has led to a fracture in the ethical foundations of government. Consequently, cracks have appeared in our democracy’s walls like that of a building on a crumbling foundation. Our democratic institutions are threatened because personal behaviors are being accepted in politics that once would have excluded a person from electoral office, if not landed them in jail. Our government has turned away from friends and cosseted tyrants in a manner that would have once been considered disgraceful. Rauch argues that America needs more of what Christianity has to offer, not less. By that, he means we need to be more concerned about others and less about ourselves; we need to be more about forgiving and less about retribution; and we need to be more about building confidence and less about promoting fear. I am a Christian. I agree with the Jew.

Terry Turner, a resident of Colquitt County, is professor emeritus of urology at the University of Virginia as well as author of books based on his experiences as an infantry officer in Vietnam.