It’s sad that following the massacre of their classmates, the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida should immediately turn to government for action instead of to their own communities. The obvious question suggested by these crimes is: What’s wrong with us? Do I know potential mass murderers who would kill if they had a weapon? How could we have failed to notice—and failed to demand action when our police and the FBI were too criminally negligent to take the necessary steps? If there’s a pothole on your corner, you’re not likely to tell yourself, as you go slamming through it every morning, month after month, “There’s one problem I no longer need to worry about. After all, I’ve told the highway department!”
It’s equally sad that gun-owners, conservatives, and libertarians, have failed so dramatically to explain their beliefs to the broader community. What do “gun rights” actually mean? Why do we differ so sharply from the rest of the West on this issue? Because we are free men by no one’s leave; we were born this way.
We need never prove that we deserve some right or other, whether or not it makes sense to the general population. If the community wants to take that right away, it better have a good reason. The burden of proof is on the taker-away, not the owner. The essence of American democracy shines through in our gun laws; they are beautiful, if we only took the trouble to explain them.
Of course if we have demonstrated to ourselves that we just can’t control certain weapons, such as rapid-firing rifles that accept large magazines, then we had better stop selling them. If we can’t keep them away from children and from evil or mentally ill adults, yes: Let’s get rid of them. But we had better notice at the same time that our new limitation is a defeat for mutual trust and therefore democracy. Democracy is mutual trust. If we don’t notice and ponder such defeats, we are mere disciplinarians who know how to punish bad children but can’t see what’s wrong with a family in which the children are always in need of punishment.
No child should have to ask his mother whether he is likely to die today at school. But no mother should wonder whether her child is apt to kill someone either. If the shadow of a doubt exists, we’d best have put the child in a place for the mentally or morally ill long ago. And the bigger question, the elephant in the room trumpeting constantly as we ignore him: Who rears our children nowadays? Where does a child get his conscience? Who supervises children day-to-day while they learn to be human beings?
Religion used to give parents a reason to discuss good and evil, right and wrong with their children. Religious schools used to help fill the gaps in a child’s moral worldview. Yes, some children figure it all out for themselves—but many don’t.
This used to be a religious country, and still is. But children learn less about religion than they used to. Does religion matter, in practical terms? What made Americans such a stubbornly religious people in the past?
Perhaps those old-timers agreed with the Founding Fathers that democracy is a delusion unless the population is religious; unless people can trust each other to treat serious things in a serious way. Some children show good moral judgment, generally because of their families. Some children don’t. But if they are sent to religious school or Sunday school, they all stand a chance of learning to think things over from a moral viewpoint. Their families are the best places for such thinking. But their families might be too busy—might be exhausted getting a living; might be embarrassed and not know where to start; might feel incompetent to discuss the topic. Or they might not give a damn after all. In any case, Sunday school is better than nothing.
It’s hard to find integrated statistics, but it’s clear that over the long term, fewer children are going to Sunday school. USA Today reported in March of 2015: “From 2004 to 2010 . . . Sunday school attendance dropped nearly 40 percent among Evangelical Lutheran churches in America and almost 8 percent among Southern Baptist churches.” A study by J. Clifford Tharp Jr., “Reflections on Southern Baptist Sunday School Enrollment,” notes, “Since 1980 [through 2004] the enrollment trends for three of the age groups are down (Preschool, Children, and Youth). The Adult area is the only segment with an increase over the time period.” And so on.
We enthuse over the sanctity of human life—and every year, fewer children know what we are talking about. Sanctity? A recent Yale graduate (one of the very sharpest) wrote one of us, regarding sanctity: “If I hadn’t read [some particular book], the concept would not have occurred to me and I would not have picked it up elsewhere.” The whole idea, she says flatly, “is not in the zeitgeist of our culture.”
The Cultural Revolution of 1945‑70 left our public schools hollow and our Sunday schools looking and feeling ridiculous. We look back in regret. But this is no historical problem for academic debate; it’s an event that happens every day, every year. We are in the replacement period, when persons of one sort die out and are replaced by a different sort. Those who were educated before the Cultural Revolution got a different kind of education from those who came after—an education focused (unlike today’s) on duties as much as rights, in which Christianity and the Bible were seen to be the guiding stars they are, keeping America on course as it wanders through the cosmos. They were not in themselves topics for public school discussion, but neither were they avoided like the plague, as they seem to be nowadays.
Judaism and Christianity were (of course) discussed in religious schools; and they were in the air. After all this is a biblical republic, born out of the intensely biblical devotion of Puritan settlers in the North and Anglicans in the South. Everyone used to learn about the Pilgrims and the dangerous journey and murderous conditions they faced so they could practice their religion. Everyone used to learn about Lincoln’s profound devotion to the Bible and hear for himself that Lincoln’s greatest speeches are theological reflections, sermons, on this nation and its struggles. “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right . . . ” They heard for themselves that these American Founders and heroes worshiped God and read the Bible.
But nowadays we send fewer and fewer children to Sunday school. And their weekday schools treat religion and the Bible as toxic substances to be avoided at all costs.
Children who used to grow up with Christianity and the Bible are not likely to read Aristotle or Kant instead. Too many grow up morally illiterate. Not true, some people say; they learn the law! But the law was never intended to supply Americans with a conscience. It doesn’t, and it can’t.
This nation needs either a religious revival (unlikely though not impossible) or a group of substitute moral codes on which we all (basically) agree. The Bible was the most important unifying force in American history: Puritans and Catholics, evangelicals and the poshest Episcopalians, trailer-park residents and mansion-dwellers, old WASP stock and Jewish immigrants from Poland, blacks and whites read the good book. But we have shrugged off the moral education of our children. What do we think will happen now?
Unless we are just as serious about fixing educational failures as we are about tightening gun control, we have taken one big step away from democracy towards the kind of intellectual-ocracy that many liberals seem to want. They work towards it by promoting the power of judges, of the press, of the schools and colleges. And most conservatives can’t be bothered to oppose them. We’re happy, and should be, when a Neil Gorsuch joins the Supreme Court, or some comparable hero steps onto a lower rung of the hierarchy. But we barely even bother to insist anymore that this nation is not supposed to be run by judges.
This is a biblical republic, and we need morally literate children. The moral blank of modern America, where Christianity has been deleted in much of the educational world and replaced by Ecology and other modern religions (but where are the Ten Commandments of Ecology?), is only one cause among many for the plague of murder we are suffering. But we are in no position to neglect it.
Natalia Dashan is a recent Yale graduate and an independent analyst in Seattle. David Gelernter, a Weekly Standard contributing editor, is a professor of computer science at Yale and chief scientist at Dittach.
