As you make final preparations for college, consider this information. American society is manifesting:
- Increasingly dysfunctional culture.
- A pervasive and abiding concern about the future
- A serious breakdown of community.
- Confusion about individual responsibility.
- Confusion about what toleration is.
- Confusion about sexuality.
As we begin the new millennium, Robert Bork in his prophetic book Slouching Toward Gomorrah warns us that the out of control individualism and egalitarianism of the 1960s are very much with us. One merely has to recall the impeachment hearings several years ago to see evidence of this sort of morality where “if what he is doing harms no one (individualism) then it is ok to do it (egalitarianism). We are part of a therapeutic culture, where wholeness is replaced by holiness, sanctification is replaced by therapy. And even the heartiest pagan is getting really tired of this mess! And, as he does, he may very well choose home schooling as an alternative to public education.
Os Guinness warns us that at some point Americans will become fed up with the excesses and dysfunctional aspects of our culture. He says that as American mainline culture fails to sustain Americans in their hedonistic pursuit of self interest, they will want something more. It is now questionable whether America’s cultural order is capable of nourishing the freedom, responsibility, and civility that Americans require to sustain democracy. Modernity (a word to describe modern American culture) creates problems far deeper than drugs. It creates a crisis of cultural authority in which America’s beliefs, ideals, and traditions are losing their compelling power in society. William Bennett is right to warn us that there is a “death of outrage†in our country but he might add that there is a numbness spreading across the land that offers much opportunity for Christians in general and for home schoolers in particular.