Has America Become an Unrighteous Nation?

Anyone who is objective about the moral climate in America, or the world for that matter, would be hard pressed not to agree that not only is America abandoning her moral foundations, but she is doing so at ever increasing speed. This leads one to wonder has America become an unrighteous nation?

According to the book, Silenced in the Schoolhouse: How Biblical illiteracy in our schools is destroying America, the abandonment of Biblically based Christian education from the schools has had a marked change on the culture: “With the removal of Biblically based Christian education from the schools, there has been a marked change in the culture. In 1910 only one marriage out of 100 ended in divorce. By the late 1960’s, that rate rose to three in ten. By the 1990’s, half of new marriages were ending in divorce. This figure fell to about 40% in the last 15 years, but does not take into account how many couples now live together without being legally married! It is estimated that when adding in second and third marriages, about 2/3 of all marriages end in divorce. The 1998 U.S. Census Bureau reports that between 1970 and 1996 the number of divorced people rose 40%.

Drilling down deeper as related to the removal of Christian education in the early 1960’s, the results are just as dismal.204 Before 1963, divorce had declined for 15 years. After 1963, it increased 300% in just over 15 years! From 1963 to 1995, unmarried people living together increased 353%, single parent families increased 160%. Today, married couples make up only 49.7% of all households in America, down from 51% five years ago.

In students, before 1963, pregnancies in girls 15-19 years had never been greater than 15 per thousand for 15 years. After 1963, this rate increased 187% in the next 15 years. For girls aged 10-14 years, the results were even more devastating; the pregnancy rates since 1963 have shot up 553%! Along with increased sexual activity, sexually transmitted disease rose from 400 per 100,000 before 1963 up to 904 per 100,000 in the next 12 years! At the time of this writing, it is estimated that half of the U.S. population lives with a sexually transmitted virus. We now know that sexually transmitted viruses cause cervical cancer.

In the public schools, SAT scores were slowly rising until 1963 with an average score of 980. This rate steadily declined over the 18 years after 1963 to a rate of 890 in 1980 and a slight rebound to 906 in 1985. A slight decrease in the rate of decline was seen in 1974-75 when there was an explosion of private religious schools. There were only about 1000 Christian schools in 1965, but between 1974 and 1984, they increased to over 32,000. On average, private school SAT scores are about 100 points higher than those in the public schools and continued to be about the same level as the public schools had been in 1963. Of the nation’s top academic scholars, three times as many come from private religious schools, which operate on a third of the funding as public schools.”