A Worldwide Moral Breakdown

“CHEATING is everywhere,” says David Callahan, who wrote the recent book The Cheating Culture. He points to, among other things in the United States, “cheating by high school and college students,” “piracy” of music and movies, “workplace theft,” “massive healthcare scams,” and use of steroids in sports. He concludes: “Add up all the various forms of ethical and legal misconduct and you have a moral crisis of serious dimensions.”

The New York Times said that Hurricane Katrina, which hit the United States late in 2005, “produced one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history.” A U.S. senator reported: “The blatant fraud, the audacity of the schemes, the scale of the waste​—it is just breathtaking.”

Granted, there are still examples of selfless human kindness. (Acts 27:3; 28:2) But too often we hear: “What is in it for me? What will I get out of it?” A me-first, look-out-for-number-one attitude seems to have become the rule.

In the past, selfish, blatant immorality has been pointed to as a contributing factor in the fall of civilizations, such as the Roman Empire. Could what is happening now be a prelude to something even more significant? Is every part of the world now being affected by “the increasing of lawlessness,” which the Bible foretells would be a mark of the end of this entire system of things?​—Matthew 24:3-8, 12-14; 2 Timothy 3:1-5.

The Decline Worldwide

Africa News of June 22, 2006, reporting on a “workshop on sexual abuse and pornography” in slums in one part of Uganda, said it is the “parent’s neglect that has increased prostitution and drug abuse in the area.” The paper observed: “The officer in charge of Child and Family Protection Unit at Kawempe Police Station, Mr. Dhabangi Salongo, said the rate of child abuse and domestic violence had increased tremendously.”

According to a doctor in India, “society is losing its cultural moorings.” One film director there said that “the combination of increased drug use and greater sexual promiscuity is yet another sign that India is sinking into ‘Western debauchery.’”

Hu Peicheng, secretary-general of the China Sexology Association in Beijing, noted: “Before in society, we had a sense of right and wrong. Now, we can do whatever we want.” An article in the magazine China Today put it this way: “Society is growing ever more tolerant towards extramarital affairs.”

“It seems everyone is taking their clothes off and using sex as a sales tool,” observed England’s Yorkshire Post recently. “Little more than a generation ago such actions would have caused moral outrage. Today, we are bombarded with sexual imagery from every conceivable angle and pornography has . . . planted itself firmly in the mainstream.” The newspaper added: “Material that was once only considered safe for an 18-plus audience is now often essential family viewing and, according to anti-pornography campaigners, often explicitly targeted towards children.”

The New York Times Magazine said: “[Some teens] talk about [their sexual encounters] as matter-of-factly as they might discuss what’s on the cafeteria lunch menu.” Tweens News, “the parentguide for 8 to 12-year-olds,” observed: “In a child-like scrawl, a young girl had written a heart-wrenching message: ‘My Mom is pressuring me to go out and date boys and have sex. I’m only 12 years old . . . help!’”

How times have changed! Canada’s Toronto Star noted that not long ago “the very idea of gays or lesbians openly cohabiting was a moral outrage.” Yet, Barbara Freemen, a teacher of social history at Carleton University, Ottawa, observes: “People now say, ‘Private life is private life. We don’t want other people interfering.’”

Clearly, over the past few decades, morals have deteriorated rapidly in many places worldwide. What has led to these radical changes? How do you personally feel about them? And what do the changes indicate for the future?

When Morals Declined Dramatically

WHEN would you say the dramatic moral decline began? Within your lifetime or perhaps that of older relatives or friends? Some say that World War I, which erupted in 1914, ushered in our era of unparalleled moral decadence. Professor of history Robert Wohl wrote in his book The Generation of 1914: “Those who lived through the war could never rid themselves of the belief that one world had ended and another begun in August 1914.”

“Everywhere, the standards of social behavior​—already in decline—​were devastated,” says historian Norman Cantor. “If the politicians and generals had treated the millions under their care like animals dispatched to slaughter, then what canons of religion or ethics could any longer inhibit men from treating each other with the ferocity of jungle beasts? . . . The slaughter of the First World War [1914-18] thoroughly debased the value of human life.”

In his comprehensive work The Outline of History, English historian H. G. Wells noted that it was following the acceptance of the evolution theory that “a real de-moralization ensued.” Why? Some held that man is simply a higher form of animal life. Wells, who was an evolutionist, wrote in 1920: “Man, they decided, is a social animal like the Indian hunting dog . . . , so it seemed right to them that the big dogs of the human pack should bully and subdue.”

Indeed, as Cantor noted, the first world war had a devastating effect upon people’s sense of morality. He explained: “The older generation was completely discredited in everything​—its politics, its dress, its sexual mores.” The churches, which prostituted Christian teachings by endorsing the evolution theory and egging on the warring sides, contributed greatly to the moral decline. British Brigadier General Frank Crozier wrote: “The Christian Churches are the finest blood-lust creators which we have and of them we made free use.”

Codes of Morality Discarded

In the decade after World War I​—the so-called Roaring Twenties—​old values and moral restraints were brushed aside and were replaced by an anything-goes approach. Historian Frederick Lewis Allen comments: “The ten years which followed the war may aptly be known as the Decade of Bad Manners. . . . With the old order of things had gone a set of values which had given richness and meaning to life, and substitute values were not easily found.”

The world’s Great Depression of the 1930’s sobered many by plunging them into abject poverty. By the end of that decade, however, the world had entered another, even more devastating, war​—World War II. Soon nations were making fearsome weapons of destruction, snapping the world out of the Depression but plunging it into suffering and horror beyond human imagination. By the end of the war, hundreds of cities lay in ruins; two in Japan were devastated, each by a single atomic bomb! Millions died in gruesome concentration camps. Altogether, the conflict took the lives of some 50 million men, women, and children.

During the horrid circumstances of World War II, instead of adhering to long-held traditional standards of propriety, people adopted their own codes of behavior. The book Love, Sex and War​—Changing Values, 1939-45, observed: “It seemed that sexual restraint had been suspended for the duration, as the traditional licence of the battlefield invaded the home front. . . . The urgency and excitement of wartime soon eroded moral restraints, and life on many home fronts appeared as cheap and short as life on the battle front.”

The constant threat of death intensified people’s yearning for emotional relationships, even transient ones. One British housewife, in justification of the sexual permissiveness during those dramatic years, said: “We were not really immoral, there was a war on.” One American soldier admitted, “By most people’s standards we were immoral, but we were young and could die tomorrow.”

Many survivors of that war suffered as a result of the horrors they witnessed. To this day some, including those who were then children, suffer flashbacks, feelings that the trauma is happening again. Many lost their faith and along with it their moral compass. Without respect for any authority that might establish standards of right and wrong, people began to see everything as relative.

New Social Norms

After World War II, studies were published regarding human sexual behavior. One such study in the United States in the 1940’s was the Kinsey Report, of more than 800 pages. As a result, many people began to talk openly about sexual matters, which earlier were not as commonly discussed. Although the statistics given in that report regarding those engaging in homosexual and other deviant sexual behavior were later recognized as exaggerated, the study revealed the dramatic moral decline that had followed the war.

For a time, there was an effort to preserve the appearance of propriety. For example, in radio, motion pictures, and television, immoral content was censored. But that did not last long. William Bennett, formerly a U.S. secretary of education, explained: “By the 1960’s, however, America began a steep and uninterrupted slide toward what might be called decivilization.” And this was reflected in many other lands. Why, in the ’60’s, did the moral decline accelerate?

That decade saw, almost simultaneously, the women’s liberation movement and the sexual revolution with its so-called new morality. Also, effective birth-control pills were developed. When sex could be enjoyed without fear of conception, “free love,” or “sexual relations without any commitments by either partner,” became common.

At the same time, the press, the movies, and television loosened their moral codes. Later Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former head of the U.S. National Security Council, said regarding values presented on TV: “They clearly extol self-gratification, they normalize intense violence and brutality, [and] they encourage sexual promiscuity.”

Already by the 1970’s, VCR’s had gained popularity. In the privacy of their homes, people could now view immoral, sexually explicit material that they would never have allowed themselves to be seen viewing in a public theater. More recently, by means of the Internet, pornography of the most despicable sort has become available in lands around the globe to any who have a computer.

The consequences in many ways are frightening. “Ten years ago,” said a warden at a U.S. penitentiary recently, “when kids would come in off the street, I could talk with them about right and wrong. But these kids coming in now have no idea of what I’m talking about.”

Where Can One Turn?

We cannot turn to the world’s churches for moral guidance. Rather than upholding righteous principles as did Jesus and his first-century followers, the churches have made themselves part of this world and its evils. One writer asked: “What war was ever fought in which God wasn’t claimed to be on each side?” As far as upholding God’s moral standards is concerned, years ago a New York City clergyman said: “The church is the only organization in the world which has a lower entrance requirement than those for getting onto a bus.”

Clearly, the dramatic decline in the morals of this world cries out for something to be done. But what? What change is needed? Who can make it, and how will it be accomplished?

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“The slaughter of the First World War [1914-18] thoroughly debased the value of human life”

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VIRTUES VERSUS VALUES

Virtue used to be clear-cut. Either a person was honest, loyal, chaste, and honorable or not. Now, the term “values” has replaced “virtues.” But there is a problem with this, as historian Gertrude Himmelfarb observes in her book The De-Moralization of Society: “One cannot say of virtues, as one can of values, . . . that everyone has a right to his own virtues.”

She notes that values “can be beliefs, opinions, attitudes, feelings, habits, conventions, preferences, prejudices, even idiosyncrasies​—whatever any individual, group, or society happens to value, at any time, for any reason.” In the present liberalized society, people feel justified in choosing their own values, just as they would choose groceries in a supermarket. But when this is the case, what happens to true virtue and morality?

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Degraded entertainment is more and more easily obtained

Where Is This World Headed?

THE BIBLE foretold the present moral breakdown long in advance and described it this way: “In the last days critical times hard to deal with will be here. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, . . . disobedient to parents, unthankful, disloyal, having no natural affection, . . . fierce, without love of goodness, betrayers, headstrong, puffed up with pride, lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God, having a form of godly devotion but proving false to its power.”​—2 Timothy 3:1-5.

You may agree that this Bible prophecy is an accurate description of the world today. Yet, it was recorded nearly 2,000 years ago! The prophecy is introduced with the words: “In the last days.” What does that expression, “the last days,” mean?

“The Last Days” of What?

“The last days” has become a very common expression. In the English language alone, it has been part of the title of hundreds of books. Consider, for example, the recent book The Last Days of Innocence​—America at War, 1917-1918. The prologue makes clear that when using the term “the last days,” the book refers to a specific time, one in which there has been a tremendous decay in morals.

“In 1914,” the prologue explains, “the country was changing more rapidly than at any time in its history.” Indeed, the year 1914 marked a plunge into war worldwide, which had not been experienced before. The book says: “This was total war, the conflict not of army against army but nation against nation.” This war, as we will see, occurred at the beginning of what the Bible terms “the last days.”

That this world would experience before its actual end a specific time called “the last days” is a teaching of the Bible. The Bible, in fact, says that a world once existed that has already passed away, or ended, explaining: “The world of that time suffered destruction when it was deluged with water.” What time was that, and what was the world that ended? It was the ancient “world of ungodly people” that existed in the days of the man Noah. Similarly, today’s world will end. Yet, those who serve God will survive the end, as did Noah and his family.​—2 Peter 2:5; 3:6; Genesis 7:21-24; 1 John 2:17.

What Jesus Said About the End

Jesus Christ also spoke of “the days of Noah,” when “the flood came and swept them all away.” He compared conditions that existed before the Flood​—just prior to the end of that world—​with those that would prevail during the time that he identified as “the conclusion of the system of things.” (Matthew 24:3, 37-39) Other Bible translations use the expression “the end of the world” or “the end of the age.”​—The Jerusalem Bible, The New English Bible, and the New International Version.

Jesus foretold what life would be like on earth just before the world’s end. Regarding war, he said: “Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom.” Historians have noted that this occurred beginning in 1914. Thus, the prologue of the aforementioned book spoke of 1914 as marking the beginning of “total war, . . . not of army against army but nation against nation.”

In his prophecy, Jesus added: “There will be food shortages and earthquakes in one place after another. All these things are a beginning of pangs of distress.” He went on to say that among other things there would be an “increasing of lawlessness.” (Matthew 24:7-14) Surely we have seen this occur in our day. Today’s moral breakdown is so severe that it is fulfilling Bible prophecy!

What should our lives be like during such a decadent time? Note what the apostle Paul wrote to Christians in Rome regarding moral decay. He pointed to the “disgraceful sexual appetites” of people, observing: “Both their females changed the natural use of themselves into one contrary to nature; and likewise even the males left the natural use of the female and became violently inflamed in their lust toward one another, males with males, working what is obscene.”​—Romans 1:26, 27.

Historians say that while human society then sank ever deeper into moral decay, “the little Christian communities were troubling the pleasure-mad pagan world with their piety and their decency.” This should cause us to pause and ask: ‘What about me and those I choose for associates? Do we stand out as different, as morally upright, unlike those who carry on immorally?’​—1 Peter 4:3, 4.

The Battle We Have

The Bible teaches us that despite the immorality surrounding us, we need to be “blameless and innocent, children of God without a blemish in among a crooked and twisted generation.” To do this, we need to keep “a tight grip on the word of life.” (Philippians 2:15, 16) This Bible statement provides the key to how Christians can remain untainted by moral corruption​—they need to hold fast to the teachings of God’s Word and recognize that its moral standards represent the best way of living.

“The god of this system of things,” Satan the Devil, is trying to win over people’s hearts. (2 Corinthians 4:4) The Bible tells us that he “keeps transforming himself into an angel of light.” His ministers, those who serve him by acting like him, do too. (2 Corinthians 11:14, 15) They promise freedom and fun, but as the Bible says, “they themselves are existing as slaves of corruption.”​—2 Peter 2:19.

Have no illusions about it. Those who ignore God’s moral standards will suffer dire consequences. The Bible psalmist wrote: “Salvation is far away from the wicked ones, for they have not searched for [God’s] own regulations.” (Psalm 119:155; Proverbs 5:22, 23) Are we convinced of that? If we are, let us protect our minds and hearts against permissive propaganda.

Many, however, unwisely reason, ‘If what I’m doing is not illegal, then it’s all right.’ But that is not so. Our heavenly Father lovingly provides moral guidance, not to make your life boring and restrictive, but to protect you. He is “teaching you to benefit yourself.” He wants you to avoid calamity and enjoy a happy life. Indeed, as the Bible teaches, serving God “holds promise of the life now and that which is to come.” That is “the real life,” eternal life in his promised new world!​—Isaiah 48:17, 18; 1 Timothy 4:8; 6:19.

So compare the benefits of following Bible teachings with the heartache that eventually comes to those who fail to do so. Winning God’s favor by listening to him is truly the best way of life! “As for the one listening to me,” God promises, “he will reside in security and be undisturbed from dread of calamity.”​—Proverbs 1:33.

A Morally Upright Society

The Bible says that when this world passes away, “the wicked one will be no more.” It also says: “The upright are the ones that will reside in the earth, and the blameless are the ones that will be left over in it.” (Psalm 37:10, 11; Proverbs 2:20-22) So the earth will be cleansed of all remnants of immorality, including all those who refuse to abide by the wholesome teachings of our Creator. An earthly paradise, similar to that in which God placed the first human pair, will then gradually be cultivated earth wide by lovers of God.​—Genesis 2:7-9.

Consider the pleasure of living in such a cleansed earth of paradisaic beauty! Among those who will be privileged to see it will be the billions resurrected from the dead. Rejoice in God’s promises: “The righteous themselves will possess the earth, and they will reside forever upon it.” “[God] will wipe out every tear from their eyes, and death will be no more, neither will mourning nor outcry nor pain be anymore. The former things have passed away.”​—Psalm 37:29; Revelation 21:3, 4.

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When a world ended, there were God-fearing survivors

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After this world ends, earth will become a paradise