Feb-March 1998

RELIGION THAT AINT BROKE AND

HEDONISM GONE BESERK!

Great concern has been voiced lately about the Religious
Freedom Amendment making its way through the Congress and enjoying the
powerful support of much of its leadership. Among the goals of the amendment is
to permit public school prayer - possibly even coercive prayer - which until
now has been barred by First Amendment separation of church and state
considerations. Erosion of the wall separating church from state, which has
stoutly pro­tected the rights of the minority against the tyranny of the
majority, could irretrievably endan­ger this defining bulwark of the American
democracy since its inception. It is not an alto­gether unwarranted
apprehension that Jewish children, or, for that matter, children of any
denomination, would be compelled by social peer pressure to participate in
these religious exercises or expose themselves to derision and even worse.

Indeed,
there is an attempt now in the Ft. Meyer, Florida public school system to
formal­ly institute the study of the New Testament into the school curriculum,
including the resur­rection, as if it were pure and unchallenged history. A
federal judge for the time being has enjoined its implementation and ordered
that the curriculum be revised. But, she did not nec­essarily reject out of
hand the notion of New Testament study in the public school system. (See U.S.
News & World Report, 2/1/98).

Ironically,
some of the strongest and most unrelenting advocates of the amendment which, of
needs, would bring the government into the business of religion - to define the
contours of the amendment and then to regulate it- have always been counted
among the archest foes of government intrusion into the life of its citizens.

Frank
Rich, a journalist at large of the N.Y. Times whose particular beat seems to be
the cultural landscape of our time and place, counterposed,
as if in wonder, the strenuous push to pass the Religious Freedom Amendment
with recent studies which reveal that religion, indeed, is doing very well in
America. Polls indicated that 71% of Americans never doubted the existence of
G-d; 61% believe that miracles come from the power of G-d: 53% believe
in daily prayers. All these figures significantly higher than similar polls
taken only ten years ago; and that weekly worship in America is twice as much
as in France or England. (We won­der whether these statistics would be
reflected in the Jewish community as well!)

Against
this backdrop, Mr. Rich asks: If religion ain't broke in America, why does
every­body want to fix it!

The trouble is that hedonism in America ain't broke either! and more to the point, what­ever gains religion may
have made in the last years, statistically anyway, have been more than offset,
many fold over, in quality and impact, by the incredible inroads hedonism-the
rampant spirit of anything goes - has made in a comparable period and which
more nearly characterizes America in 1998 than it did a generation or two ago.

This
is particularly evident in the so called sexual revolution that has taken hold
in our land and the havoc it has wrought upon the cohesiveness of family life
and social stability. It has led to a dichotomization-a deep fissure in the
public consensus of those values and commit­ments to which overwhelmingly all
our people at one time adhered: at the very least, paid , strong and not
insincere lip service. That consensus has been shattered.

Somehow,
we've been sold a bill of goods that the grandest realization of a free society
is one without any personal moral fetters - where laissez - faire is
the order of the day in pri­vate or public morality. It is dismantling piece by
piece the old morality. More specifically, that code which takes its life from
our Torah whose moral teachings from the beginning, have informed the fabric of
our democracy. It is not merely belief in G-d that, has distinguished America
for most of its history but also the conviction that we have to live a moral
life as that moral life was conveyed by Him in Scripture - essentially the
Hebrew Bible.

In
the Zorach decision of 1952, the Supreme Court avowed: We are a
religious people whose instructions presuppose a Supreme Being. The subsequent
Abington School District vs. Schernpp decision striking down school
prayer proclaimed even more emphatically: The Founding Fathers believed
devotedly that there was a G-d and that the unalienable rights of man were
rooted in Him, and that, the unconstitutionality of school prayer
notwithstanding, today, as in the beginning, our national life reflects a
religious people.

The
noted American critic Edmund Wilson wrote: Our conception itself of America as
a country with a mission in the world COMES DOWN TO US FROM OUR MOSAIC
ANCESTORS

We
say all this even as we avow with no less passion that America is a great
country pre­cisely because it does not compel on the part of any of its
citizenry religious fealty of any sort

-
that America is a haven for the agnostic and atheist even as it has been the
safe port for the religious persecuted.

Nonetheless,
the moral consensus, which once embraced even the non-believing, is no longer
that twined chord which in the past held together the rich and discrete
tapestry which comprised the American civilization.

On
the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Kinsey
Report, an arti­cle prominently located in Sunday Times Week in Review section
strongly lobbied for exten­sively broadened and government funded research on
the sexual habits of Americans as an update to Kinsey's original findings. That
report, probably more than any other single event, broke down the doors of
sexual restraint in America. The article bemoans Senator Jesse Helms veto of
this kind of government sponsorship and assistance as if it were some loutish, neanderthal
assault against free inquiry. And this after unabashedly citing a recent and
well received biography of Kinsey by James H. Jones which reveals - apparently
on the basis of painstaking and years long research that Kinsey, in fact, was a
masochist and a homosex­ual whose real agenda was to promote homosexuality.
And, all along, we were led to believe that it was pure scientific research
that animated his statistical quest into heretofore unchar­tered terrain.

I
don't like government censorship as much as the next fellow, but I understand
the titan­ic struggle for the soul of this spiritually vexed nation between religion
that aim broke and hedonism gone berserk! I can understand also,
and with much sympathy, the thrust to-intro­duce religion into our school
curriculums even as I dread the national calamity it can portend!

Rabbi Zevulun Charlop