It was late in the 1970s, and Conservative Protestant Christianity was just awakening to the importance of political action. I wanted to find a phrase for the public arena to describe what I stood for, a phrase that an unbeliever could embrace as easily as a believer. It had to define a category narrow enough to include only the moral choices Christ requires but broad enough to roll comfortably from the lips of a politician. I think I came up with "traditional morals" on my own, but leaders like Jerry Falwell of Moral Majority made "traditional values" the vogue term. In retrospect, what I really wanted was to proclaim Christ in the political arena without inviting persecution. It was an understandable, human sort of goal, but it was also wrong. I thought I was clever; In fact, I was a wimp.
"Traditional values" is Christianity in the language of capitulation. It fits comfortably in the mouths of politicians because it says nothing offensive. Unbelievers can embrace it because it contains nothing to make an unbeliever uncomfortable. But it fails to say what our culture needs to hear. We do not want our neighbors to adopt traditional values; we want them to acquire Christian virtue.
Modern Americans seem to lack integrity. We start projects and do not finish them. We make promises and do not keep them. We acquire debts and do not pay them. We marry and then abandon our spouses and children; we divorce when things don't work out. We lie to our insurance agents, we lie to our tax agents, we lie to our employers, we lie to our spouses, we lie to ourselves. We steal, we cheat, we gossip, we dishonor our parents, we dishonor God. Then we blame everyone but ourselves for the deterioration of the nation's wealth and stature. Unfortunately this describes many who profess Christ as well as those who don't.
The cure for the above is to behave according to God's law by the power of the Spirit, as penned by Paul:
"So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.... the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law." (Galatians 5:16,22-23)
It might appear that earlier Americans were better at this than we are, but they did not get that way by adhering to tradition; they got that way by looking
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