Everyone knows the the metaphor of The Frog in the Pot. It has been said (falsely, I am informed) that a frog placed in hot water will immediately jump to safety whilst one placed in tepid water and gradually warmed will linger in the froggy jacuzzi until its strength is sapped and it perishes. Well, true or not, I like the metaphor because it accurately describes the human condition as we can observe it.

Acceptable decline, be it physical, intellectual, economic, influential, or moral, does not happen overnight. Sudden change is noted, and if seen as threatening, reacted to. We call those events, “wake-up calls.” 9/11 was a wake-up call. Islamic assaults on western civilization have been going on since Mohammed. America’s first experience with them was the Barbary pirates capturing American merchantmen in the Mediterranean shipping lanes in the early 19th century. In fact we date the birth of American naval policy to those assaults. We even get the phrase, “the shores of Tripoli,” in the Marine Corps hymn from our battles there. But 9/11 did what scores of earlier incidents had failed to do: it shocked Americans into action. It is a perfect Frog in the Pot analogy: a slow rise in Islamic activity produces no response; a swift rise produces all-out war.

The last American election was in large part a response to a rapid change in our national understanding of morality and its place in public life. There is nothing new under the sun; what was will be. We have not experienced a single social change that has not been in process for generations. A brief historical survey can place the seeds of change in our own revolution from British rule. Our forefathers, physical or otherwise, WERE revolutionaries. It wasn’t just the oppression of king and parliament they were casting aside. They were creating a new society based on new views of individualism rather than oligarchy and collectivism.

Now this new freedom from state control was checked by a strong religious community. A protestant Christianity rooted in the English Reformation set the moral standards for the new Americans beyond which but few, and then only in secret, dared violate. Oh, there were the artists and entertainers who flaunted society’s standards, but their social status was but slightly above whores and innkeepers, and when they got too flagrant in their flaunting of social restraints, they were punished. Yet each flaunting of social norms raised the temperature of the pot ever so slightly. Their writings and actings put the “I wonder?” into the minds of the standard bearers of society.

With nationhood came the push west and its consequent separation of the more free-thinking pioneers from their more settled east coast relatives. New utopian experiments cropped up all over western New York and on into the territories. They tried everything from the celibacy of the Shakers to the group marriages of the Oneidans. New religions cropped up to replace the stagnancy of the old. The Mormons, the Seventh-day Adventists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Dispensationalists, the Christian Scientists, the Pentecostals, and many others, trace their origins to this new-found freedom in this new nation.

Then came the American Civil War, the bloodiest and most heartless conflict America has ever experienced. It overturned the entire American social order. It ended a century of southern state dominance of American political life. It devastated the southern states, reducing them to a level of poverty from which they are yet emerging even now, 150 years later. Many veterans of that war fled the devastation of their homes and headed west. We can only imagine the level of what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in those war veterans! Those men and that army that overwhelmed the Plains Indians and massacred them when they “got in the way”; those violent men who formed the legend of the American West with their hard drinking and hard fighting were the men who, many of them yet boys, had stood almost toe to toe and fired volleys of minie balls into the other’s ranks. (BTW, I loved Gunsmoke as a kid. I was well into adulthood before I realized Miss Kitty was a prostitute and a madam! 😦 )

That Civil War also reduced the religious certainty of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-merciful God to a smoldering wick. How could one believe in a Sovereign God who rules all things in accordance to his divine will and yet experience this devastation of home and body? It should come as no surprise that from this questioning despair we get the rise of modern theological liberalism. The church’s answer was, “You can’t!” The book that teaches that certainty must certainly be false.

I hope you’re not tiring of this little historical sketch because there is more to come. We get the incomprehensible horror of the War to End All Wars. What the American Civil War produced on a national level, WWI produced on the international: Nation states created and abolished; millions of young men massacred by industrial warfare and incompetent leadership; the mass migration of peoples; despair, disillusionment, and a collective abandonment of all certainty by thinking people everywhere.

Now you take the catastrophe that was this war for so many, couple it with the rise of modern psychology and psychiatry, the continued dominance of religious liberalism, “modern” economic theories like communism, and the atheistic origins theories of Darwin and others, and you get the disillusionment of the Roaring 20’s, the abandonment of reality in art, harmony in music, truth in literature, and moral certitude in society.

This is the world that gave us the death-dealing -isms we know so well: Communism, Fascism, Nazism, and Feminism. Every one of them is a reaction to the failure of the old ways of thinking and doing. If there is no God-way, then it’s every person for him/herself. If you don’t like the old norms – cast them aside! Your ways are as good, as right, as true as any other.

And so we have the rise of the LGBTQ movement and its demand to be, not just treated with tolerance, but treated as just an equally valid expression of human identification as the old, pre-modern, religion-based view of human identity and origins. What I believe myself to be is what is regardless millennia of thought and experience.

And this brings us back to the last election.The Obama administration, the Supreme Court, and the media moguls raised the temperature in the pot too quickly. The vast hinterland of America had not completely absorbed the radically changing views of the urban dwellers. Oh, they had absorbed quite a bit: they love Ellen and Elton, George, the soft porn of the Kardashians and Victoria’s Secret, the harder porn of Games of Thrones and Orange Is the New Black, and the hard-core porn free and private on the internet. (If you don’t believe that to be a problem, just look at the rise of sexual impotence in Teens and 20’s men.) The mindless pursuit of pleasure is as common in flyover country as elsewhere. The opioid epidemic doesn’t grow out of despair, it is just a side-effect of pleasure’s pursuit. But, middle America wasn’t quite ready to publicly embrace their secret sins. Their candidate was by no means a righteous knight in shining armor! He was a boorish lout who was about as far from being a paragon of virtue as one could be, and the Christianity he was espousing was that modern parody of biblical Christianity: the Prosperity Gospel of name it and claim it. But at least he said he was going to turn the heat down on the pot and Make America Great Again.