Character and Values

Written on Wednesday, July 3, 2013 by Nick Adams

It was the French social scientist Alexis de Tocqueville who famously said: “America is great because America is good. If America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”

There are some who consider social conservatism a distraction, and argue Republicans should purge this agenda in order to survive. These people are dead wrong. Character and values make a nation. They underpin everything. They underlie the American financial crisis. They underline the difference between America and other countries. They buttress correct foreign policy.

America’s challenge to remain the greatest nation that this world will be determined solely by its ability to retain its character and values. In 2012, forty-two percent of American babies were born to unwed mothers. When Ronald Reagan was first elected in November 1980, it was eighteen percent. That’s a problem. The ban of partial-birth abortions (a live, fully formed infant) by the Supreme Court earned the opposition of the current American President, who was subsequently re-elected. That’s a problem.

Moral and cultural relativism are hurting America. They threaten to destroy its character. And these two relativism cancers are being sponsored by big government. But big government can’t be addressed or downsized without talking about the human attitudes and values that produced it. To Read More…..

My Take – I think you will find this comment by Ted R. Weiland instructive.  

"It was the French social scientist Alexis de Tocqueville who famously said: “America is great because America is good. If America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”  Following is some more from de Tocqueville:

 

"The emigrants who colonized the shores of America in the beginning of the 17th century somehow separated the democratic principle from all the principles that it had to contend with in the old communities of Europe, and transplanted it alone to the New World," he would write in the introduction to his great work. "It has there been able to spread in perfect freedom." 

 

Do not overlook that de Tocqueville credited the early 17th-century Christian Colonials who established governments of, by, and for Yahweh NOT the late 18th-century framers who established a humanistic government of, by, and for the people, He also wrote the following:

"They exercised the rights of sovereignty; they named their magistrates, concluded peace or declared war, made police regulations, and enacted laws as if their allegiance was due only to God. Nothing can be more curious and, at the same time more instructive, than the legislation of that period; it is there that the solution of the great social problem which the United States now presents to the world is to be found.”

This is a way of looking at the very emotional and intellectual foundation of what made America unique in the world and what made the country prosper. We have now become like Europe and will suffer the same failure Europe is experiencing. Nothing is right, nothing is wrong, too many regulations, too much taxation, too many government bureaucrats, too much spending, too much debt, too many experts, too many activists in government, too many central planners; and government that has forgotten its place. Most importantly; we are faced with government that thinks it can and should be God.