Passing on True Religion
Louis R. Tarsitano on Islam, Christianity, and Moral Education
The unsettling, but predictable, news comes from Britain that a recent survey of teenagers of all religious backgrounds revealed that while most Muslim young people believe the teachings of their inherited faith, most young Christians openly reject the teachings of the Church. In other words, young Muslims are much more likely to be Muslims, than young Christians are to be Christians.
The study, conducted by the Reverend Professor Leslie Francis of Bangor University, found, among other things, that only 15 percent of young Roman Catholics believe their Church’s teaching against sex outside marriage. Furthermore, despite their Church’s clear teaching on the sanctity of human life, only half of them opposed abortion. The results among other young British Christians were just as dismal.
Although Islamic leaders will no doubt find room for improvement in the statistics, at least they have the consolation (in comparison with the Christians) that 49 percent of their young people believe that sex should be confined to marriage and 58 percent oppose abortion. If religious groups were scored on the curve, the Muslims would have the “A” students.
Two Reasons
I would identify at least two factors behind this disparity of results, all of which were obtained in the setting of an industrialized Western nation. This was not a comparison of young Britons with young Saudi Arabians, but a study of young people of different religious inheritances living in, or at least surrounded by, the same secular culture.
Islamic faith, at least for the present, is proving more resistant than Christian faith to being made over in the image of that secular culture. Why this should be so has more to do with the Western Church’s often abject surrender to modernism and the failure of Christian clergy to provide young people with an intact ecclesiastical tradition, than it does with some sort of “natural superiority” of Islamic sexual ethics.
Sexual morality does matter, of course, in an absolute way; but it may also serve as an indicator of a church’s or a mosque’s effectiveness in teaching its youth the fullness of its faith. How we treat one another sexually says as much about our answer to the question “Who is God?” as it does about the question “Who am I?” The promoters of modernism have always known this, and they have promised limitless sexual favors to those who will adopt the materialistic agenda of their man-centered creed.
Modernism, which has long claimed for itself the status of mainstream Western culture, has been empowered by its pandering to the worst in fallen human nature, offering an ever-expanding menu of casual, varied, and frequent sexual intercourse without responsibility. Postmodernism (modernism’s “new and improved” second release) continues the pattern, with an even greater stress on the supposed “relativity” of the morality of every sort of relation among persons.
Neither modernism nor postmodernism, however, has been able to do away with shame, the fig leaf that remains of the innocence of Eden. Treating other people as sex toys or as the clinical instruments of personal gratification elicits shame from all but the sociopath.
Since human nature and its capacity for shame cannot be changed by human fiat, the unhappy (because he feels shame) sexual slob has to blame something outside himself for his discomfort, such as the practical social structure of the family or the written expressions of a moral code. Thus, in its futile efforts to banish shame, the rutting party must question the organization of the family and the express doctrine of the churches.
Louis R. Tarsitano (d. 2005), a former associate editor of Touchstone, was a priest of the Anglican Church in America and rector of St. Andrew?s Church in Savannah, Georgia. He also was the co-author, with Peter Toon, of Neither Archaic Nor Obsolete: The Language of Common Prayer & Public Worship (Brynmill Press, Ltd., 2003).
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