We “are losing our kids to a satanic cult,” said Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) Friday. “We’ve lost our moral values across the country.”
Tuberville made his comments while speaking to approximately 100 GOP delegates at a warehouse in Bluffdale, Utah, while campaigning for U.S. Senate candidate Trent Staggs, a Republican who’s running to fill the seat being vacated by Senator Mitt Romney.
As The Salt Lake Tribune reported Friday:
“I’ve traveled all over the country — all 50 states — I’ve been in good places and bad places. The one thing I saw, we are losing our kids to a satanic cult,” Tuberville … warned.
… Tuberville said the 2024 election wasn’t Republican vs. Democrat but “anti-American vs. American.”
“We’ve lost our moral values across the country. We’ve got to get back to the Constitution, and we have got to get back to the Bible. We’ve got to get God back in our country,” Tuberville said. “There’s not one Democrat that can tell you they stand up for God.”
Touching on other matters, Tuberville also criticized the MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, aka “transgender”) agenda; predicted that, as in 2020, left-wing mobs would cause mayhem nationwide this year to help Joe Biden’s reelection efforts; inveighed against our two-tiered (in)justice system, which coddles Democrats while crucifying Republicans; and threw shade on Mitt Romney.
But it was his comments about our demonic cult of vice that attracted the most attention. In fact, the Tribune asked Tuberville after his speech about his those references, if they were a product of mere political zeal. He didn’t backtrack.
“‘They’ve basically taken God out of everything that we’re doing. I don’t know any other way to express it other than it’s some kind of cult that they’re trying to push on our kids and all Americans,’” the Tribune quoted Tuberville as responding. “‘We have got to get back to our moral values. If we can’t get back to that and let the Democrats continue to push this cult on us and take God away from our country, we’re going to have huge problems.’”
Of course, talk of “morality” isn’t exactly in vogue. It today conjures up for many Church Lady images, and I myself got the hairy eyeball once when mentioning it to a man who was very disgruntled with our “system.” But certain things are timeless, and, for sure, morality talk is traditionally American — the Founding Fathers emphasized it repeatedly.
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality…,” warned our second president, John Adams. “The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue.” (Note: Virtue is defined as that set of “good moral habits.”)
“Laws without morals are in vain,” Benjamin Franklin observed, uttering a line that would become the University of Pennsylvania’s motto.
Patrick Henry, most famous for saying “Give me liberty or give me death,” opined likewise. “A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience,” he noted, “is incompatible with freedom.”
Many other such Founder quotations exist, too, and this raises a question: Were these men delusional? If not — and if morality is necessary to maintain a constitutional republic — how can we assess if Tuberville is correct about our having lost it? And how, then, can we restore it?
Well, we first need to know what morality is, so we can use it as a yardstick for measuring our current status — and so that we’ll have a precise prescription for achieving moral health.
If you listen to many today, from academics to media commentators to sidewalk pop-philosophers, you’ll think that “morality” is a social construct. It’s a function of a society’s consensus opinion, its “values,” is the idea; in fact, this belief is precisely why the term “values” is favored today over “morality.” We also may hear that these values, these tendencies, are merely a function of biology — in our DNA. But does this make sense?
To analyze the matter, consider my flavors analogy:
Who or what determines what this thing we call morality is?
Only two possibilities exist: Either man or something outside of him does. If the latter, something vastly superior and inerrant (i.e., God), then we really can say morality exists, apart from man. It’s real. Yet what are the man-as-measure implications?
Well, imagine the vast majority of the world loved chocolate but hated vanilla. Would this make vanilla “wrong” or “evil”? It’s just a matter of preference, of whatever flavor works for you.
Okay, but is it any more logical saying murder is “bad” or “wrong” if we only do so because the vast majority of the world prefers we not kill others in a manner the vast majority considers “unjust”? If it’s all just consensus “opinion,” it then occupies the same category as flavors: preference — or taste.
In other words, we should make up our minds and be honest in speech: If we really believe “morality” is mere social construct, a function of people’s collective desires for behavior, let’s not put lipstick on the pig of our moral relativism/nihilism by calling our consensus preference “morality” or even “values.” Let’s just call it like it is: These are our provisional preferences or “behafashes” (behavior fashions).
Yet realize something else, too. If “Man is the measure of all things,” if behafashes are all we have, if society is author, then we cannot logically say “Our society has become immoral” (including in different words). For society itself is then the yardstick, and a yardstick cannot be out of conformity with itself. A yardstick is itself.
So Tuberville is essentially correct. To be “moral,” morality must exist; for morality, properly understood, to exist, God must exist. It then also follows that if people cease believing in God, properly understood, they’ll cease believing in morality, properly understood. This explains why a study found that, in 2002 already, only six percent of teens believed in morality (objective by definition).
This moral confusion does, of course, set the stage for great evil to reign. Rape, murder, steal — lie and degrade the legal system and violate the Constitution to destroy political opponents? Why not? Who’s to say it’s wrong.
Don’t impose your values on me.
Sound familiar? This is where we are, now.
Thankfully, there is a solution. First we need to understand, espouse, and cultivate in the young the above philosophical understanding of morality (and God). Then, just as breeding excellent tennis players involves grasping the principles of the game and inculcating them in your charges, the same must be done with the principles of morality: the virtues. If a generation is raised having an emotional attachment to virtue and becomes habitually moral, proper citizenship and voting habits will naturally flow from that. As the twig is straight, so grows the tree.
As the Founders understood, virtue and faith are everything. Be under no illusions: In a morally corrupt society, the only difference between democracy and dictatorship is the rate at which the dark cloud of tyranny descends upon the people.
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.