Dr Paul Allen

“The greatest question of our time,” historian Will Durant offered, “is not communism versus individualism, not Europe versus the UK, not even East versus the West; it is whether men can live without God . ” That question, it now appears, will be answered in our own day. For centuries, the Christian church has been the center of Western civilization . Western culture, government, law, and society were based on explicitly Christian principles. Concern for the individual, a commitment to human rights, and respect for the good, the beautiful, and the true—all of these grew out of Christian convictions and the influence of revealed religion. All of these, we now hasten to add, are under serious attack. The very notion of right and wrong is now discarded by large sectors of American society . Where it is not discarded, it is often debased. Taking a page out of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, modern secularists simply declare wrong, right, and right, wrong. A NEW LANDSCAPE Quaker theo

“It turns out that poverty and family structure are intertwined in this country,” Professor Melissa Kearney of the University of Maryland told Freakonomic’s Stephen Dubner . “You can’t be interested in children’s well-being and not look at family structure.” Over 40 per cent of US births and 35 per cent in Australia are to unmarried mothers. But there’s been a big change. “It turns out that in 1960 only five per cent of births in the US were to unmarried mothers,” says Kearney. Marriage in the US has declined mostly amongst less educated sections of the population. This big change has its victims: “The kids born to less-educated single mothers are falling further and further behind.” “Fewer than ten per cent of births to women with a college degree are outside marriage,” says Kearney. The figure for those with a high school certificate or less is 60 per cent. Freakonomics points out that decades of socio-economic research has confirmed many times that there is a link between fam