The Deseret News
ran an article this week about the American Family Survey, an annual nationwide
study conducted by the Deseret News, BYU, and YouGov. First, the statistics.
The percentage of children born outside of marriage (34%) has stayed about the
same or dropped slightly over the past ten years. The percentage of high school
students who have had sex dropped from 48 percent in 2007 to 40 percent in
2017. In 2006, 40 of every 1,000 births were to teenage girls age 15 to 17; ten
years later, that rate was 20. There were 3.6 divorces per 1,000 Americans in
2007; in 2017, that rate was 2.9 of 1,000. These statistics are relevant to the
American Family Survey. One final statistic that wasn’t mentioned in the
Deseret News article: the national abortion rate declined 26 percent between
2006 and 2015, hitting the lowest level that the government has on record.
The survey is
enlightening because it shows that most Americans are wrong about the direction
of the trends shown by the first four statistics. They would likely be wrong
about abortion too, but that question was apparently not asked. Another
enlightening result of the survey is that Republicans are more wrong than
Democrats. In other words, conservatives have a more pessimistic view of
American morals than liberals do. This, I believe, is not coincidental. I think
this reflects two realities. First, conservatives tend to be backward-looking.
America was somehow better in the past, so they have to bring back some lost
America that they yearn for with nostalgia. The only problem with this perspective
is that the statistics in so many ways don’t bear this out. Progressives, on
the other hand, are forward-looking. They not only believe in progress, but
that progress is the consistent long-term trend that humanity follows. This is
an optimistic view. Still, more than half of Democrats were wrong about each of
the trends mentioned above. Just not as wrong as Republicans.
The second
reality is perhaps explanatory: a large percentage of the Republican base is
composed of Evangelicals and Mormons and other religious groups who believe in some
form of millennialism. The Deseret News article makes this point: “White
evangelical Protestants also stand out for their poor performance on some of
the trend-related questions. While members of most faith groups were wrong
about as often as an average U.S. adult, white evangelicals were more likely to
hold incorrect assumptions about rates of teen pregnancy, births outside of
marriage and teen sex.” I think the reason for this is that millennial
religions have a core belief that the world is going to hell. Everything is
getting worse. It has to. Otherwise, there is no urgent need for the Second
Coming.
And Latter-day
Saints fall into this trap. Our whole religious outlook is colored by the
belief that the end is coming, soon. The world is getting worse and worse, and
when things get bad enough, then Jesus will come and create a paradise. We no
longer have prophets who predict that the Second Coming will happen by a
certain date or claim that people in the congregation will live to go back and
build up Zion in Jackson County (see Lorenzo Snow in about 1899). But we are
told that Satan is quadrupling his efforts and that the world is becoming
increasingly evil. The only problem with this rhetoric is that many statistics suggest
Satan is not very effective. Another statistic that contradicts this apocalyptic
view is that violent crime has fallen sharply over the past quarter century.
So, in terms of many behaviors Christians would consider immoral, America is
actually becoming more righteous, not less.
Our leaders also
use coded language sometimes that is understood to mean we are near the end.
For example, when the age of missionaries was lowered to create a brief surge
in the number of missionaries serving, it was labeled “hastening the work.” The
unspoken implication here was that we have to hasten the work because the end
is coming. But when the surge didn’t last, and when the results (say, baptisms
per missionary) were disappointing, this slogan sort of went away.
My point here is
both political and religious. I believe we should take the statistics seriously
and adopt an optimistic view of human potential and societal progress. I also
believe we do ourselves a disservice when we insist that our nation and the
world are going to hell in a handbasket, just to support the idea that the end
is nigh, regardless of societal trends. My own feeling is that if we can
survive Donald Trump’s presidency, and I firmly believe we can, then our
society will continue to move in positive directions, especially in addressing
some of our most serious challenges—global warming, health care, gun violence,
and income inequality. Oddly, on these fronts, it is the Republicans who are intentionally
trying to make our world worse. But perhaps that is consistent with their
millennial views. Maybe they are trying to make the Second Coming happen by torpedoing
the world we live in—a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.
