The agony of the leper in the ancient world was not limited to the physical pain one endured as the body became more decrepit.
The emotional and relational hurt experienced as one became separated from family, community and even church must not be overlooked. This separation and alienation cut to the quick just as surely as did the weakening limbs and rotting skin. Isolation was the cultural curse of leprosy. Accordingly, restoration to community life along with newly strengthened limbs brought added joy to the leper fortunate enough to encounter the healing touch of Jesus Christ in the town squares of Palestine. For the leper to be deprived of his customs, his culture, and his civilization was a grave burden added to the loss of his health. To get back into the swing of things thanks to the Master’s kindness was an exaltation not to be ignored. To be part of society once again was very heartening.
The present American generation is certainly and unhappily making lepers of itself by rejecting not just the Christian religion but also the fruits of that religion – Judaeo-Christian culture. The United States of America never formally embraced a state religion. And a number of religious traditions have prospered in the United States thanks to this constitutional provision. But for most of its history, American society embraced Judaeo-Christian culture as a viable social framework in which faith, family, business and government could prosper. Challenged from time to time by certain elites and quietly disregarded when inconvenient, still the fatherhood of God, the Ten Commandments and Sabbath observance were as American as Kate Smith, Cole Porter and “God Bless America.”
In the same generation as America’s founding fathers, an irreverent Napoleon Bonaparte was observing in France that Christianity is not merely belief in God, it is the secret to the social order. Even if the French did not go to church, they needed an accepted framework to guide them in their daily lives. Oaths taken on the Bible, marriages solemnized in church, holy days observed to benefit workers, the charitable, educational and nursing ministries of religious congregations all contributed to the good ordering of society. Much more recently and much less cynically, Pope Benedict XVI has observed, “The Christian faith has proved to be the most universal and rational religious culture. Even today, it offers to human reason the basic structure of moral insight which … furnishes the basis of a rational moral faith without which no society can endure.”
The Judaeo-Christian culture has served the Western world and the United States very well. Sadly though, this patrimony of human reason enlightened by revealed faith is experiencing swift decay. It has been suggested lately that oaths be secularized for unbelievers who come to court. Church attendance among traditional ecclesial communities is remarkably diminished. The newly conceived, the embryonic, the unborn, the chronically ill, the irreversibly ill, and the disconsolate ill are assessed with less and less God-given dignity. And the latest statistics are not surprising but equally distressing. Marriage, the very basis of society, is now the family unit of only 51 percent of Americans. Others choose the single life, single parenthood, divorce, cohabitation, and, let’s not forget, same-sex unions. Four out of ten children are born to single mothers. The divorced and the cohabitating are at an economic disadvantage as well. In abandoning the traditional Judaeo-Christian appreciation of holy matrimony, Americans are placing the family unit in clear peril.
Author David Berg has lamented that America has become a nation “without anchor or compass.” Our society has lost the anchor that was the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that steadying connection with the past that revealed how men and women of good will best resolved the perennial issues of worship, family, property and respect. America has also misplaced the compass that is the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that knowledgeable guide which points steadily at man’s true destiny, guiding society through inevitable storms along the one authentic course to fulfillment. Without the faith of our fathers, without Judaeo-Christian culture, mankind once again accepts that isolation, that moral loneliness, that spiritual leprosy, which separates him from the true foundation of his life.
