DADI.org

In a highly charged, emotional story like the Littleton Massacre, one can always suspect the motives of outsiders who suddenly interpose themselves into the event. Was is necessary to see Tom Brokaw, standing on the Columbine High School grounds in a windbreaker, adding nothing in the way of commentary that the regular NBS reporter couldn't provide?

Even more unsettling is the media-fueled hysteria and breast-beating that occurs as talking heads reflexively ask each other, "How could this have happened?" Then the floodgates overwhelm us, with each advocate or special interest supplying his own interpretation.

Legislators want public funding for schoolhouse armed guards, metal detectors and an immediate "summit meeting" of various bigfeet to show that they care. Gun control advocates want laws to further restrict firearm ownership. Media watchers want to browbeat movie, TV and music producers. Psychologists recommend more youth counselors for alienated teens. Ministers bemoan the proscription of religious values in the classroom. Social commentators point to the "culture of death."

Each of these groups thinks that a mechanical adjustment in some way will remedy the situation. As palliative measures, they all miss the larger point: none of them is going to work. These point-the-finger people fail to recognize that America is a very different place than it was 30 years ago.

There are larger forces at work that result in eruptions of hate such as what took place in Littleton. They are surely the outcome of America's embrace of secularism as the nation's dominant social philosophy. From the 1960s on, our country increasingly has denied the national need to connect shared religious and moral values, in effect, banning religion from the public square. Almost like a hobby that one chooses or not to undertake, religious belief is relegated to the status of a private matter for individuals. Thus a nation whose very founding was rooted in the precepts that derive from a shared religious belief has become unmoored from the very source of its moral strength.

In its place, American society now champions strictly secular shared beliefs to bind the social fabric: in litigation, to settle endless disputes among citizens; in unbridled individualism, that lionizes the self as the starting point of all values; and intrusive government control, that unconstitutionally tries to engineer equality of outcomes in every endeavor. That these secular articles of faith are insufficient, and in the absence of strong parental and institutional moral guidance, it is no wonder that young people are left adrift in a sea of relative and arbitrary values that such a society encourages.

Like organisms with no immune systems, our callow youth are subjected to a popular culture that worships celebrities, regardless of worth. In turn, many of these actors, athletes, musicians and others in the entertainment industry lead lives of vulgar exhibitionism and moral turpitude -- qualities that would have doomed them and their careers only 40 or 50 years ago. Today, a fawning media spurs them on to further outrages to keep in the spotlight.

Politicians fare no better as moral exemplars, for they are routinely revealed as dissemblers, self-interested manipulators and unrepentant liars, up to and including the President of the United States.

It has long been argued that children's values are shaped by what they see and what they hear. If you wonder what these values are, look no further than what they watch on TV or in the movies, what music they listen to, and what computer games they play.

The sorry spectacle at Littleton is one of many examples of a contemporary moral anomie, particularly shocking in its depravity at the hands of those so young. But when a society repudiates its own inherited moral conscience as reflected by its culture, what else can be expected?

Tocqueville's warning is prescient: "Once religion has lost its empire over the souls of men, the most prominent boundary that divided good from evil is overthrown; kings and nations are guided by chance and none can say where are the natural limits of despotism and the bounds of license."