Opinion column

Will declining morals lead to collapse of society?

James Knight suggests that the increasing liberalisation in our society, and the decline of Christian values, could lead to the eventual collapse of that society.

J. D. Unwin was a well-known social anthropologist who studied primitive tribes and civilisations through 5,000 years of history. He found an interesting positive correlation between the cultural progress of a society and the sexual restraint they observe. Although Unwin wasn’t a Christian, he thought (with good Biblical foundation) that a flourishing society needed four key things to keep it healthy: 1) Belief in God, 2) monogamy, 3) chastity and 4) rational thinking.
 
Once strict pre-nuptial chastity began to depart from social norms, Unwin predicted it wouldn’t be long before belief in God, monogamy, and ultimately, rational thinking became heavily eroded. He predicted that a society that goes down this route of abandonment has about 100 years left before it collapses (by ‘collapse’ he means it loses its cohesion, its moral framework, its core family unit structure, its healthy influence, and its purpose).
 
When a society becomes more liberal, it tends to become more economically prosperous - and when it becomes prosperous, it tends to become even more liberal, until it reaches a tipping point, after which it tends to become too liberal with regard to sexual morality, and the above collapse is expected to occur within about three generations of its inception.
 
Now, there are a couple of caveats here. Naturally, there are many ways to measure whether a society is deemed healthy, there are positive benefits to a country’s increased liberty, and there are many downfalls that are not directly the result of the abandonment of pre-nuptial chastity and monogamy. But the general observation is one that accords with what Christians know in the Bible to be sound guidance on these matters (Hebrews 13:4, 1 Corinthians 7:1-40).
 
Unwin measures a generation as 33 years, and says that society has one generation of increased sexual freedom before the decline really starts to emerge, and we begin to feel the effects of compromised monogamy, diminished belief in God, and an assault on our reasoning. In the UK, our increased sexual freedom began to gather strong momentum in the late 1960s, so by the early 2000s the negative effects should have been starting to be brought to bear on the culture – and as a consequence, as I write this in 2023, there may be less than 50 years left in the UK before the Unwinian collapse.
 
Given that dozens of countries around the world have a similar attitude to Unwin’s four qualities as we do in the UK, there could well be a pretty severe demise of cultural across the globe, from a multitude of nations who have abandoned God and the healthy Biblical precepts that accompany that belief.
 
Now I would not be so bold as to suggest that Unwin’s timelines are precise enough to be properly measurable, but I think his thesis is interesting, and I suspect that his portentous warnings have been gradually becoming manifested in our socio-cultural decline in recent decades, and look likely to get worse in the coming decades.
 
Belief in God has already declined greatly, and our once beloved sense of reasoning has been supplanted for a dubious, unattractive post-modern ‘feelings over facts’ entitlement. The strong nuclear family unit is absent in so many households, as are good parental role models, and the union of marriage has been diluted by the masses, where pre-nuptial chastity would be seen as complete anathema to the majority of young people these days.
 
Over the past half-century, in the world’s most materially developed and liberal nations, so much has happened to divest these societies of Christian values and Christian influence (both deliberately and inadvertently), and put inferior things in their place.

I don’t know how accurate Unwin’s predictions will turn out to be, or whether it’s already too late to get things back on track. But one thing is for sure; if Unwin’s hypothesis is correct, then this generation of Christians has an absolutely essential role to play in stopping this vehicle from heading too much closer to the cliff edge, over which it looks doomed to fall if we carry on as we are.

The image is courtesy of pixabay.com.

James Knight is a local government officer based in Norwich, and is a regular columnist for Christian community websites Network Norfolk and Network Ipswich. He also blogs regularly as ‘The Philosophical Muser’, and contributes articles to UK think tanks The Adam Smith Institute and The Institute of Economic Affairs, as well as the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (LICC). 

The views carried here are those of the author, not necessarily those of Network Norfolk, and are intended to stimulate constructive debate between website users.