by Claire Ducker

Created on: March 11, 2009   Last Updated: March 13, 2009

Americans used to think of themselves as a Christian nation, but they were really more cultural Christians than truly religious. The proportion of the seriously devout may never have been greater than it is now, but most Americans identified themselves as Christian. They went to church regularly, knew the Bible, and believed the basic Christian doctrines, such as the Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement.

Americans also used to believe in (more than they actually practiced) Christian morality. They thought that sex outside of marriage wrong, that promises were morally binding, and that God was the source of all morality. Politically, they believed that the authority of government was derived from God and that loyalty to one's country was a moral as well as a civic virtue. (Europeans were also cultural Christians, but this fact did was not so closely bound up in national identity as it was for Americans.)

There were always dissenters: non-Christians, of course, but also various deists, theists, Transcendentalists, Unitarians, and other free thinkers. There were also those who felt oppressed by the moral constraints of Christian culture and others who were dismayed by the discrepancy between belief and behavior. There were also frank hypocrites, who turned the prevailing belief system to their own ends.

Some, but certainly not all, of these were actually hostile to Christianity and Christian culture, but they lacked a unifying philosophical system with which to attack it. In the early twentieth century this deficit came to be supplied by Marxism. Soviet-style communism was never widely attractive to Americans, but it was to a greater extent to Europeans. European Marxists fully expected an uprising of the proletariat during the First World War.

When this revolution failed to materialize, European Marxist intellectuals began to formulate a doctrine of cultural revolution with the object of bringing about universal Marxism by undermining Western civilization, along with its Christian underpinnings. This movement was centered at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. With the rise of Hitler, many of these scholars sought refuge in American universities. After the war some of them, notably Herbert Marcuse, remained in America.

During the years following the War, these intellectuals achieved increasing prestige on university campuses, where they influenced the young radicals of the nineteen sixties. These, in turn, began to transform the terms of public discourse until Marxist ideas, suitably disguised, became the lingua franca of the Left. The result is modern "political correctness," which David Lind has called cultural Marxism.

One of the most devastating of the techniques employed by these subversives is called the "Critical Theory," which is the practice of negatively criticism of every aspect of western culture without accompanying recommendations for change or improvement. Since anything can be criticized, there can be no effective logical response absent any proposition for change.

The success of these efforts is undeniable. America is no longer culturally Christian, even if it is not yet culturally Marxist. Many Americans cannot even name the four Gospels, much less articulate the meaning of the Atonement. Public and private morality have declined to the point that no one seriously defends notions like chastity, lifelong commitment, or individual responsibility, not to mention patriotism (as it was traditionally understood).

The questions Americans need to address are whether this change is a good thing, and, if not, what is to be done about it.

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