Going to Hell in a Handbasket: An American Tradition?

If you think our society is going downhill fast, you are not alone. This view, held by many in the United States today, has been common before in American history.
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If you think our society is going downhill fast, you are not alone. This view, held by many in the United States today, has been common before in American history. In the seventeenth-century, ministers declared that their society was falling apart, overtaken by sin and a loss of core values. They spread their message of social failing far and wide, trying to persuade their listeners to act to reverse the troubling changes overtaking their society.

In 2016, Americans, of various political persuasions and ages, believe our society is declining. A recent poll noted that more than half of those surveyed thought that things are changing for the worse. (See the poll results here.)

Although the gloomy forecast is far more common among self-identified Republicans in the sample than among those with other affiliations (with Democrats more optimistic than Independent voters), at least a sizeable minority in each group embrace the narrative of decline. At one time Americans were more optimistic, expecting science, medicine and the American political experiment to solve many problems that had long plagued humankind. The atrocities of the 20th century--the Holocaust foremost among them--promoted a new pessimism about the human condition. The supposedly more enlightened modern age proved capable of the worst horrors, which challenged the widespread faith in progress. More recently, our unlimited access to information and the tendency of news outlets to package the news as entertainment means that we have greater exposure to the most appalling and bizarre stories. We wallow in the gory details, which affects our understanding of the nature of our society.

Whatever the reason for a negative perception of the direction of change in our own day, the idea of social decline has an important precedent in early America. Ministers in colonial New England, within only a few decades of the founding of Massachusetts Bay, regularly preached that their communities were going downhill fast. They cited all sorts of sins and shortcomings, chastising their congregations for failing to live up to the standards for a godly society. The problems they identified were some that might befall any society--such as materialism--but others--such as the sin of tolerating people of Christian faiths other than their own--would appear less obviously problematic today. They called their congregations to reform, in an effort to halt the deterioration.

This tale of widespread decay so dominated public discourse that the great early 20th-century scholar of New England Perry Miller coined the term "jeremiad" to characterize these sermons. He thought the minsters patterned their harangues on those of the prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament, preaching as he did about the sinfulness of the people. We might wonder how a society that was only three decades old could have established a standard against which to measure drastic decline. What could have occurred so quickly to make it a worthy target for so many irate sermons? The clergymen's lament assumed a golden age, in which the first generation of settlers had been godly and admirable; by contrast, they depicted the second generation, the children of the first settlers, as unable to match their parents' commitment. Something similar happens today, when politicians and pundits claim that our society was once better. In both cases, claims of "declension" (to use a term favored by Perry Miller) push people to change. As a rhetorical tool, it can call people to uphold societal standards or to support political and social causes.

Fear of social decline, then as now, could serve a political purpose. Whether encouraging moral reform or voting for particular candidate claims of declension are intended to alarm and galvanize. Perpetual concern over decline seems to be a recurrent American theme.

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