Faithlessness Breeds Soullessness

It begs the question: if America was still a more religious society, specifically Christian, would this have happened?

Was America a better place when it was more Christian?

I came across this video on YouTube by Jay Reed and it provoked serious thinking on my part:

TL;DW (Too Long; Didn’t Watch): Jeff Cook, the man on the left, is a Ruby Tuesday manager who was fired after 19 years with the chain after he was forced to work on Christmas. As a manager, he was expected to make his employees work, but this was a personal red line for him. He took volunteers instead, struggling through the workday, barely keeping up with the demand, all because he exercised his own moral code which told him nobody should be forced to work on Christmas.

First, it speaks to Jeff Cook’s character that anyone volunteered to show up and work with him. Second, as he points out, the company didn’t pay an extra dime for those who worked on a holiday. As someone who’s worked many holidays in the past, I know this is standard. But that doesn’t make it right. Holidays are meant to be a society’s collective day off. If you’re going to make someone work on what’s meant to be a day off, at least make it beneficial.

It begs the question: as Christmas is still a religious holiday, if America was still a more religious society, specifically Christian, would this have happened?

More Americans today are likely to say religion is a bad thing versus a good thing. However, when they say this, it’s Christianity they’re thinking of. When it comes to the world’s big three faiths, Americans are ambivalent about Judaism and downright deferential towards Islam, but we’ll leave that aside for now. Most Americans view religion as a source of problems, not a solution.

They also view things like which happened to this former Ruby Tuesday manager to be driven by corporate greed and they’re probably not wrong about it. But ask yourself: how did we ever get to a point where forcing Americans to work on Christmas, let alone any holiday, became an acceptable norm? To be more blunt, if America was still a strongly Christian society, even if only in cultural terms, would anyone think it made sense to work on Christmas, a holiest of holy days?

Look at it this way - why would a secular society which sees no role for religion to play in the public arena regard Christmas with any level of deference? People think secularism means all religions are respected, but in practice, this means religion is given no respect all. Now, things aren’t so simple. As I stated above, Christianity is regarded with contempt in modern American society, while Judaism and Islam receive far more regard. The point is that a society which views any religion with a contemptuous mindset simply won’t care one bit about giving people a day off on a religious holiday.

The former Ruby Tuesday manager reveals he’s a believer, I presume a Christian. It makes you wonder: could he have cited religious discrimination? After all, if he’s a Christian and he’s being forced to work on his religion’s biggest holiday, I don’t see how that’s not a violation of his religious freedom. I’m really interested to hear what those with a better understanding of the law think about this. My gut feeling, though, is that a Muslim might have a better chance at winning a similar argument than a Christian would.

As someone who’s irreligious, I also recognize that every society has to have a religion of some sort. The fact is, the less Christian America became, the busier, more Darwinistic, more cut-throat our society became. I don’t want to pretend like everything was so much better in the old days when we all said our prayers and attended church on Sundays, but one would also be lying in pretending things weren’t lost the less Christian we became.

For example, Americans of a certain age remember when businesses closing on Sunday was a more normal practice. A friend in Germany once told me one of the reasons she liked America was because stores remained open on Sundays, while in Germany, a country which is far more irreligious than even the U.S., stores closing on Sundays is still a common practice. There are upsides and downsides to both systems, but anyone who’s worried about Americans being overworked shouldn’t see businesses being closed on Sundays as a bad thing.

Some people would respond by saying that they have to work on Sundays because it’s so hard to make ends meet. Okay, but does that mean you never get a day off? There are many reasons why life has become so difficult in America, but one reason that doesn’t get enough attention is that America has become an overly work-centric society. Because work has become such an indelible part of one’s identity, people will have an existential crisis without it. Yes, people need to work. People need to make a living. But work can ultimately only serve a material purpose. The meaning that work can provide a person is extremely limited, because meaning doesn’t come from materialism. Not a single person left this world wishing they’d worked more or made more money.

Some people would disagree by saying not all jobs serve a strictly material purpose. For example, a doctor or nurse probably gets more meaning from their job than most people. There’s a reason why they call these sorts of careers “callings” and “commitments” more than mere jobs. But what happens when you can’t save everyone? I remember a nurse once telling me he was going through patient records one day and was taken aback by how many of these people were no longer alive. How does one cope and come to terms with something like morality?

While I don’t impose any religious requirements on my health care workers, if I learned that a doctor or a nurse had a Darwinistic, Nietzschian outlook on life, I’d honestly be bothered by that. Part of the reason why we trust health care workers is because we believe, whether actually do or don’t, that they believe all life has value, that all lives are worth saving. That’s not a belief science, politics, or anything else can render. If anything, science makes a person more Darwinistic, given nature’s reality. Doctors and nurses operate in the scientific world, but the belief that all lives are worth saving doesn’t come from science. Science, in fact, says people have to die to keep nature in orderly balance.

In America, where work and making money has become the only consistent ethic our society shares, our new belief system says that you can make people work on Christmas because hey, religion doesn’t mean anything, and your faith is entirely a personal matter. Keep it out of your job, keep it out of the public arena. But does it really work this way? How many of us truly put our personal values on hold just because we’re out in public or on the job? Is this even a reasonable demand to make of anyone?

Ironically, it seems the demand for moral living is greater now than ever before, even among liberals, the group most hostile to religion. This tells me even they understand that a shared moral framework isn’t an option, but a necessity, for any society. As Christianity faded from the public arena, Americans tried to fill the gap with something else. Kaiser Bauch argued that nationalism was religion’s true successor, but it’s become clear at this point it’s now failing as a substitute. Interestingly, nationalism was at its strongest not only during wars, but also when the world was a more religious place, particularly in the West. It seems even for nationalism, some sort of belief in a higher power was necessary for its success.

For many Americans, politics serves as the new religion. The problem, of course, is that politics without any sort of moral framework becomes entirely self-serving. Notice that even atheists still believe in doing the “right thing.” What’s the right thing, though? Where does that moral framework come from? To some people, doing whatever it takes to survive, even if it means sacrificing everyone else is the process, is a moral good. For a good chunk of human history, that was the only real moral consideration.

The more humans lived together, the more critical a shared moral framework became, because that’s literally what kept order. The anti-religious resort to abstract concepts like “kindness” as both a moral and political foundation. But without some sort of belief in the transcendent, what purpose does kindness serve? Why be kind to anyone? If it’s just the right thing to do, what does doing the right thing even mean? People bristle at the suggestion that morality and politics go together, but morality is what makes a person confident in their answer, confident that they’re making the correct decision. It’s not so much that morality and politics can’t go together, but rather than morality must be a settled matter for politics to function.

People also resist religion on the fact that much blood has been spilled in its name. This is silly, given that politics has killed even more people throughout history. Not only that, most deaths have neither a religious nor political influence behind them. Not to mention three of the most violent regimes in history - Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Communist China - were officially irreligious or downright atheistic. No, the Nazis weren’t “Christian nationalists.” Liberals don’t know anything, as usual.

Speaking of Christian nationalism, here’s an interesting comment I came across in a YouTube video on the topic:

I’m an Orthodox Jew who grew up in Toronto in the 1950s and 1960s. Canada at that time had a very British flavor to it and was predominantly Protestant religiously and culturally. The world I grew up in was very much the “Christian Nation” that Doug and his guest describe. Everything was closed on Sunday and public decorum was maintained. The city was known as “Toronto the Good.” Apart from some very rare instances of mild anti-semitism and a bit of feeling “other,” I felt quite comfortable in that environment and felt safe and secure with what I considered a sober and responsible government. My world was well ordered and my family’s religious beliefs were respected. As a Jew I would have no problem going back to that kind of atmosphere though I fear things are going to get worse before they get better.

It makes you think - was a more Christian society really as terrible as our media and schools say it was? Or have we all been propagandized into thinking it was?

Coming full circle on this topic, the fast-food chain Chick-fil-A is an un-apologetically Christian business, whose founder was devout. Unlike Ruby Tuesday, Chick-fil-A is closed on Sundays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. As we’re all aware, the Left hates Chick-fil-A, and the chain was the target of media condemnation for decades. Yet, Chick-fil-A has consistently ranked as one of the American public’s most popular fast-food brands. Some of this might be due to the quality of the product they put out, but many also cite the quality of customer service they provide and the way they treat their employees.

In another example, In-N-Out Burger is also one of America’s favorites. It’s founders and current owners are also devout Christians, going as far as to print citations from the Bible on cups and packaging. In addition to product quality, the franchise is also known for the way it treats its employees, which, like Chick-fil-A, is superior to the way most companies do. By the way, both companies are beloved by people all across the political spectrum. I personally know liberals who hate Christianity but love both Chick-fil-A and In-N-Out.

Those same liberals would say these companies don’t need to be religious to put out a good product or to treat its people right. Maybe they’re right. But given these are faith-motivated business, are we really going to sit here and pretend like religion played no role whatsoever in the outcome? Are we really going to act like believing in a higher power, living by a well-defined moral framework has no impact on behavior?

I’m not sure I really have much of an argument on this topic. This is me just thinking aloud, reacting to the video. I genuinely feel for Jeff Cook and am truly bothered by how soulless our society has become. Maybe some things have gotten better since we became a less religious society, but many other things haven’t. We haven’t been honest about this. It keeps trying to find different ways of creating a shared morality, but we keep failing. Maybe because there’s no substitute for religion.

At the end of the day, faith is about having someone looking out for you, even if you have to imagine it. Humans are capable of so much, yet in control of so little. No person can live their lives placing trust entirely on themselves. We’re all afflicted with self-doubt many times throughout our lives. We need to be able to trust our loved ones, our society, and yes, a higher power. Even atheists still manage to contort themselves into believing astrology or karma, stupid as it sounds.

I always think back to this scene from the 1994 Disney film Angels In The Outfield, where the foster mother of the main character, played by a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt, explains the importance of believing that someone’s always looking out for us:

This scene also shows how it wasn’t too long ago that America was still culturally Christian enough a society that such themes were featured in a Disney movie. Nowadays, it seems like only horror movies are brave enough to broach the topic of faith.

I also point to this video as emblematic of the importance of faith:

This video became well known for the speech delivered in its first few minutes by U.S. Marine Corps Captain Ryan Cohen in 2010 during the war in Afghanistan. It’s a powerful speech, a warrior’s speech. But to me, the second speaker’s words meant more to me, specifically as he was about to lead everyone in prayer:

If you’re an atheist, play along. The power of prayer is exactly that. Please bow your heads.

This is why religion works. It’s not because everyone believes in some imaginary being up in the heavens. It’s because we suspend disbelief out of solidarity with one another, because we all recognize we’re in this together, and that we hold each other in our thoughts. That’s the power of faith - the belief that together, we’ll overcome, we’ll survive whatever challenges life throws our way, and no matter what, someone’s always looking out for us, that we’re never truly alone in this world.

America turned away from religion because we felt it oppressed us, stymied our full potential. Personally, I think firing a hard-working father on Christmas because he believed in something other than making money proves religion is what we need more of. But that’s just me.

What about you? What’s your reaction to Jeff Cook’s firing by Ruby Tuesday? Do you think America becoming a less Christian place has been for the better or for worse? Do you think a more Christian society would’ve saved Cook’s job, let alone force anyone to work on Christmas?

Let’s discuss it in the comments.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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