“While pundits and politicos ponder the outcome of our recent election, looking for trends and explanations, there was one statistic amidst all of the data that I found extremely relevant.

 

Our values are important to us. 

 

Apparently, an exit poll conducted by one of the polling companies returned the result that the most important issue to Americans who cast ballots in early November was values.  Matched with the proposition that a higher-then-expected number of Christians turned out to vote, this information burned up the post-election airwaves.

 

Even though Americans caring about values came as a big surprise to national media (big enoughto explain the re-election of the president), I am of the opinion that we knew this all along.

When have good citizenship, respect for your neighbor, and plain old morality not been
priorities?  Let’s make sure we read the right thing into this news, starting with what it does not signify.

 

First, the importance of our values to us does not mean that those values belong to a political party or a candidate for office.  The moral education of our children, our kindness to one another, our personal faith, and our patriotism are four cornerstones of life in Southern Missouri.

Democrat or Republican, we share these principles.  Politics do not come before any of these community institutions.

 

Secondly, values are not some new currency for the political realm, nor are they a substitute for principles and character.  Our long history of morals includes the historical record left us by our Founders, our ancestors, and the leaders of our religious institutions.  When the framers of our Constitution, in particular, made it clear that the state should not establish a religion, they could not conceive today’s uproar about prayer in school or furor over the mere mention of God in public American places. 

 Instead, they sought to protect people from state-enforced religion and,I suspect, to also protect religious thought and institutions from becoming the battleground of
political turf wars.

 

And thirdly, one exit poll does not make an airtight case for why Americans vote a certain way. The overwhelming issue of this election was leadership, and homeland security was the main concern for more Americans who voted than any other matter.  These are matters for politics and always have been.  But the social direction of our nation is far from a partisan subject, and the discussion over our values is far from finished.

This brings me to a final point – that as the world around us changes; as violence, profanity, drug use, and sexual references take over our televisions and airwaves; and as the corruption of our youth by these unhealthful influences continues – the outrage over our values should only grow. Not by way of explanation are values important, but rather by way of marking a refreshing trend in our culture.  It is long past time for us to stand on our civic duty, our standards of decency, and our faith when we talk about what is important in our lives.  Whether we are voting or sitting down to a family dinner or driving down the highway, we should promote these principles.

 

A long-standing axiom of environmental activists is that we should leave a pure, unpolluted world for our children and grandchildren.  We can apply this same thought to our culture.  I do not want for my grandchildren a legacy of violence and sex labeled as “entertainment” and broadcast on network and cable television for hours a day when they are awake and watching.

But the degradation will only continue until we reject these ideas.  And the time has come, as parents, as consumers, as Americans, and as men and women who wish to leave the world in a better state than it was left to us, to reject the erosion of our values.
 

The time has come to turn to our values in the least political of ways.”