COMMENTARY: Platoons to the rescue in an age of moral decline

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail: 71421,1551 at compuserve.com.) (RNS)-If Americans are united about one thing, […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail: 71421,1551 at compuserve.com.)

(RNS)-If Americans are united about one thing, it is that our national life is not going the way it should. People are disillusioned with government, distraught over moral decay and angry among themselves.


Most politicians, I’m afraid, just don’t get it. Fine tune this program, cut this one back, they argue, and we can engineer ourselves into the promised land. The utopians of both the left and right believe government can cure the malaise, while the traditionalists believe that America’s malaise is rooted deep in the very fiber of our lives-what we call culture.

The word”culture”often carries connotations of upper-crust pretension, but in its essence culture comes down to the songs we sing, the values we share, the institutions we join, the arts we appreciate-the totality of which builds the sense of community that binds us together.

The character of our culture is the collective vision of how we should live.

And the hard truth is, our culture is in disarray. It is marred by works of nearly incomparable filth that have spilled out of Hollywood and various recording studios-all in the name of free expression. Well-meaning government programs have contributed to family breakdown and created indolence. No wonder there is a growing number of young people-mainly adolescent males-who have no clear concept of right and wrong.

In my work in the nation’s prisons, I have discovered a frightening trend: Older inmates are actually afraid of the young toughs now coming into the system because of their ultra-violent nature. It used to be that the newcomers feared the veterans.

Meanwhile, we now abort more than 4,000 children a day; have a murder rate in our nation’s capital higher than that in many Third World countries, and there is a resurgent epidemic of drug abuse by the young.

It’s clearly 911 time, but the question is this: Who do we call?

Pay close attention to Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., a rare political leader and a traditional conservative, who understands the depths of our cultural crisis. Coats, along with former government official William Bennett, knows that we are beyond the point where government programs like midnight basketball can do much good. We need nothing short of cultural renewal.

What makes Coats and Bennett central to this debate is that they recognize we are suffering a crisis of personal virtue and civic responsibility, and that restoration of these qualities is beyond the government’s power. Instead, our Constitution rests on the premise that civic duty comes from citizens themselves acting through small groups-what English statesman Edmund Burke called the”little platoons.” Self-government works only when people, working through the intermediate structures of society, perform good works, the sum total of which results in what we call the public good.


Under the sponsorship of his Project For American Renewal, Coats has hosted encouraging congressional testimony from”platoon”leaders. Jerry Hayes, executive director of St. Louis’ Sunshine Mission, summed up his group’s work this way:”We help transform gangbangers into choir members, baby factories into responsible caring mothers and fathers, and dope dealers into Lynch Street Bistro employees of the month.” How? Joan Smith, executive director of St. Elizabeth’s, a regional maternity center in New Albany, Ind., supplies the answer:”Who mows our lawn? Who cooks our meals? Who paints our walls? Who trims our trees? Volunteers from the community, especially the churches. The number one reason why the young women at St. Elizabeth’s succeed is because they see that people-total strangers-care about their lives.” This is not the same as showing up at a welfare office, says Smith.”A personal approach is the difference between how the government and the church handle women in crisis pregnancies. We hold hands with our clients, we don’t mail checks. We provide compassion, and that cannot be bought or sold. Compassion comes from the heart.” So does success. Smith reports that 77 percent of the young women going through St. Elizabeth’s have removed themselves from welfare while 85 percent have gone on to earn a diploma or a GED. This is nothing short of phenomenal.

There is a great debate over whether these private agencies, most of them religious, should receive government funding, and how many people they can help. Utopians may not like it and the ACLU will fight it, yet it is clear that the responsibility for lifting us out of the malaise will rest upon the vitality of the little platoons.

It is equally clear that those who complain about government welfare policies-which is to say, the bulk of Americans-now have the responsibility to join a platoon, for there is much rebuilding to be done, and we are quite late in the day of cultural decline.

MJP END COLSON

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