Albert Mohler: The Eclipse of Christian Memory

Friday, March 27, 2009

Excerpt:
Christianity once formed the worldview of New England. While it was never true that all New Englanders were believing Christians, it is true that the worldview that gave birth to colonial America was explicitly Christian in substance and, most specifically, in moral commitments. That first era of New England history was pervasively Christian and pervasively Protestant. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New England was reshaped by the arrival of millions of immigrants from Europe, and millions of these were Roman Catholics. Thus, by the arrival of the twentieth century, many New England neighborhoods and city centers were shaped, very noticeably, by Catholic moral teachings.

Now, in the as the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, the increasingly secularized character of New England helps to explain why the region is now ground zero for same-sex marriage.

The moral teachings of Christianity have exerted an incalculable influence on Western civilization. As those moral teachings fade into cultural memory, a secularized morality takes its place. Once Christianity is abandoned by a significant portion of the population, the moral landscape necessarily changes. the rest