Subsuming Custom and Individual Morality with the Collective

You may be aware of efforts to remove God from society and efforts to deny that most of the Founding Fathers were God-fearing and all believed in the benefits of the Bible and Judeo-Christian values to society. The following is an attempt to explain its dangers.

Dennis Prager, a Jewish theologian and political commentator, explains why he reads the Bible and its positive impact on society, including its historical context in the founding of the United States and its impact on Western Civilization, in the "The Bible vs. Heart".

Prager, in "Socialism and Secularism Suck Vitality out of Society", describes this in terms of societal vitality and describes how lack of belief in God opens doors to non-violent "isms" to become substitute religions as well as violent "isms" such as "Marxism, Marxism-Lenism, Fascism, Maoism, and Nazism.":

Religion in the West raised all the great questions of life: Why are we here? Is there purpose to existence? Were we deliberately made? Is there something after death? Are morals objective or only a matter of personal preference? Do rights come from the state or from the Creator?

And religion gave positive responses: We are here because a benevolent God made us. There is therefore, ultimate purpose to life. Good and evil are real. Death is not the end. Human rights are inherent since they come from God. And so on.

Secularism drains all this out of life. No one made us. Death is the end. We are no more significant than any other creatures. We are all the results of mere coincidence. Make up your own meaning (existentialism) because life has none. Good and evil are merely euphemisms for "I like" and "I dislike."

Thus, when religion dies in a country, creativity wanes. For example, while Christian Russia was backward in many ways, it still gave the world Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Tchaikovsky. Once Christianity was suppressed, if not killed, in Russia, that country became a cultural wasteland (with a few exceptions like Shostakovich and Solzhenitsyn, the latter a devout Christian). It is true that this was largely the result of Lenin, Stalin and Communism; but even where Communism did not take over, the decline of religion in Europe meant a decline in human creativity — except for nihilistic and/or absurd isms, which have greatly increased. As G. K. Chesterton noted at the end of the 19th century, when people stop believing in God they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. One not only thinks of the violent isms: Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Fascism, Maoism, and Nazism, but of all the non-violent isms that have become substitute religions – e.g., feminism, environmentalism, and socialism.

The state sucks out creativity and dynamism just as much as secularism does. Why do anything for yourself when the state will do it for you? Why take care of others when the state will do it for you? Why have ambition when the state is there to ensure that few or no individuals are rewarded more than others?

America has been the center of energy and creativity in almost every area of life because it has remained far more religious than any other industrialized Western democracy and because it has rejected the welfare state social model.

Prager is not alone in this. A similar sentiment was expressed in a debate I attended between Dinesh D'Souza and an atheist where atrocities committed in the name of religion and by atheist regimes were compared, during which D'Souza listed genocides committed by such violent "isms" also identified by Prager in the above. Many of these regimes also targeted those with political or religious differences either physically or by imprisonment - e.g. the Gulags, or Saddam Hussein's Iraq - or by making life all but impossible for them. This type of effort to debilitate or eradicate political or ideological foes - or even those living peaceably beside you - is nothing new. Consider the Israelites being committed to slavery by the Egyptians prior to the days of Moses; however, there have been many examples since, such as the persecution of the French Huguenots and the Inquisition, or the more recent genocide in Rwanda.

Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II, by Michael Burleigh, describes the ascendency of Fascism in Germany, as follows:

[WWI] was more than a defeat for, in [Hitler's] view, the collapse had been brought about by internal subversion. In the minds of many culture pessimists, this was the culmination of an erosion of values characteristic of the modern industrial urban era in general. But this collapse was simultaneously an opportunity to inaugurate a new era in which the laws of nature would reign supreme, and collective considerations would supersede the bounds of custom, Church and family. Ideology and morality, the private and the political, were to be subsumed into a single imperative based on the community, whose core values were ethnically specific and expressed through such atavistic notions as 'healthy popular instinct'. This would replace the Judeo-Christian concept of conscience, and there would be no more subversion based on the thinking of the Jews Marx, Freud and Einstein. To make this seem less revolutionary, traditional values like bravery diligence, duty, honor, loyalty, obedience, sacrifice and soldierly fortitude were enlisted to support it.

The book goes on to explain how the desire for racial purity expressed itself against the Jews, especially, but also non-Aryans and how "soldierly virtue was perverted into the fanatical belligerence of SS 'political soldiers', who became 'soldiers of destruction', a transformation of values that leached into the regular army and police." The book also describes the Nazi use of "calculated eugenics," among other things.
Could this subversion of values by collectivist considerations eventually happen in the United States? We may be deluding ourselves to believe otherwise. First, few people would argue there has been a shift from Bible-based ethics to moral relativism defined at the level of the individual. Dennis Prager describes this shift in terms of impact to society in "The Bible vs. Heart":

For well over a generation, we have been living on "cut-flower ethics." We have removed ethics from Bible-based soil that gave them life and think they can survive removed from that soil. Fools and those possessing an arrogance bordering on self-deification think we will long survive as a decent society without teaching the Bible and without consulting it for moral guidance and wisdom.

Second, removing or supplanting God in society is more dangerous than perhaps commonly perceived because it generates a vacuum for replacing individual morality with the collective or other avenues for redefining what is and is not virtuous that might follow the destructive models of the past. Based on the public outcry and the amount of tolerance for each, one might observe how beliefs in things like not protecting the environment (tending toward collectivist as described by Burleigh) are in practicality considered greater evil than not maintaining what have traditionally been considered individual morals such as not lying, stealing, cheating, etc., although most of our laws are still based on enforcing those traditional beliefs (e.g. the belief that stealing is wrong). Individual actions once upheld as morals are rationalized based on the situation, whereas items once considered important, but not on the level of a self-evident moral standard, are now looked upon as morality seemingly by a majority of the public. One evidence of this is the push against "global warming deniers" or, now, "climate change deniers." Dennis Prager describes this mechanism in his writing.

More than that, if/when government starts to define what is/is not acceptable regarding beliefs, including in the form of punitive actions to those who disagree with the government-enforced opinion, the government is tending toward fascism. This is described in another article by Dennis Prager. Unfortunately, the US government has started enforcing opinions contrary to the moral or political beliefs of many, in the form of punitive actions and/or in the name of tolerance. And many are concerned religious liberty will go by the wayside now that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of gay marriage.

If the United States truly becomes a post-Christian society, I hope that loyalty to Judeo-Christian values – even if society does not understand the source of those values – prevents the type of societal slide accomplished by Fascism in Germany and obstructed in Italy. While there were other factors that allowed for what resulted in WWII and the atrocities committed - things such as appeasement and conditions in Germany after WWI - let the above caution each of us of the perils of subsuming God and individual moral accountability to traditional Judeo-Christian values with a collectivist version of right and wrong and of what is virtuous; and let the above caution against totalitarian enforcement of beliefs to regulate behavior.

Interestingly, in describing Mussolini's Italy, Burleigh (Moral Combat) explains how Mussolini's efforts to reshape Italian culture were not entirely successful because the people were not willing to allow Mussolini's fascist vision to override 'custom, Church and family (my paraphrase). Perhaps there is still hope.