By Paul Murano, June 29, 2018
Recently there was an article in USA Today entitled, Is America headed toward a civil war? Sanders, Nielsen Incidents Show It Has Already Begun (June 25 USA Today; Glenn Harlan Reynolds, opinion columnist). It spoke of the great divide in this nation which may be coming to a tipping point. One thing that struck me was this sentence:
“It would be nice if people felt social ties that transcend politics. Americans’ lives used to involve a lot more intermediating institutions — churches, fraternal organizations, neighborhoods — that crossed political lines.”
Do we have these “intermediating institutions” anymore, binding people together and serving as a buffer between the individual and government? Let us look beneath the surface at each of these one at a time:
Churches
Since the devil through his progressive movement has firmed up his grip on the three culture-molding establishments of the modern world – journalism, entertaining, and academia – church attendance has plummeted. Religiosity in the western world has been weakened by the left’s war on religion, particularly Christianity, and the nation’s soul has been slowly converting to the new national religion of self-worship, secular progressivism. As a result, churches have less impact on society in reminding it of its ultimate purpose.
Fraternal Organizations
The psychologically healthy practice of men gathering and working together for the common good within non-political organizations has all but disappeared. Radical individualism has made money-making the priority, and radical feminism has left the community without a heart. The left’s continuous attack on fraternal and faith-based organizations gathering together with any mission other than politics has rendered such fraternal unions impotent.
Neighborhoods
Before the contraception revolution, families had several children and neighborhoods were vibrant. Women were home, neighborhood children played with each other daily, and weekend cookouts and other neighborhood events were a regular occurrence. Today you are lucky if you know the names of those who live next door. There is little or no connection between neighbors today, and locked doors on bigger houses with less children have become emblematic of our age.
For the past 50 years, developed countries have contracepted and aborted themselves into cultural suicide, while the glue (women) of the family and neighborhood focused more on careers. Why? Someone told them in the 1960s that women couldn’t be fulfilled being women, and could only be happy doing what men were doing – which among other things included working outside the home and away from the children. Contraception was the catalyst that enabled this to happen. Our subsequent 1.4 children per family average and divorce culture have created stale neighborhoods full of virtual strangers who no longer know how to relate or connect.
Conclusion
There are no “intermediating institutions” that have much impact anymore. This is a sad but true reality of the devastation created by the sexual revolution, begun by the popularization of the birth control pill. The family has broken down, neighborhoods have become places where people come home to sleep, fraternal organizations are pretty much a thing of the past, and churches in general have lost influence by a growing loss of faith as well as a government usurping its realm of authority and influence on society. Consequently, many individuals are left confused and lonely. Therefore, our culture has left its population raw without intermediary institutions to buffer the deep divide between those who are man-centered and those who are God-centered.
There is little left in civil society to keep people at least superficially cohesive. As a result we don’t even agree on what a man or a woman is anymore, or what marriage is, or if the lives of ALL innocent humans beings should be protected rather than just some. Two perceived realities with no buffers, sharing one society, can create warring parties.
How to heal this fundamental divide before it gets violent? As does everything, it all begins with God. When God is rejected or ignored, families break down and then communities break down. A renewal of faith is needed to rediscover man’s purpose – His purpose in relationship to God and to each other. These foundational relationships create vibrant churches, giving birth to vibrant families and communities, and ‘social ties that transcend politics’.
https://www.catholicvote.org/the-great-divide-from-civility-to-civil-war/