Culture and Religion

America today is in a virtue deficit where our standards of right and wrong have become increasingly hazy. Out of this haze have arisen great problems within our society including: hostility towards organized religion, sexual exploitation, the homosexual agenda, the demise of the family and the culture of death. Sadly, we now live in a country where children kill children, families are broken, mothers have been told that allowing an abortionist to take the life of an unborn baby is simply a matter of "choice," and where the public expression of our nation's religious heritage is considered a crime. These are disastrous trends for our country. If they aren't reversed, America – this great experiment in self-government – will be in jeopardy. Unfortunately, politicians have done much to make these problems worse by pursuing policies that shift power from families to the bureaucracy and by imposing Washington's values on the American people. This must stop. We need elected leaders who will care as much about the virtue deficit as they do about the budget deficit.

We realize that one of the main underlying causes of all of these problems is the secularization of our country. Recently, we have witnessed a substantial effort by secularist forces to prevent people of faith from continuing to acknowledge religion in the public square. At a time when Americans need to be reminded of our nation’s moral roots and the virtues that spring from those roots, secularists have worked tirelessly for such things as removing the words “under God” from our country’s most sacred oath, an education system that forbids any mention or recognition of faith and the removal of Judge Roy Moore as Alabama’s Chief Justice because he refused to remove a 10 Commandments monument from the state’s Supreme Court building.

Not only have the public expression and acknowledgement of religion and traditional values been banned, but in their place emerges the liberal culture, which targets our children. Hollywood serves up a steady diet of irresponsible sex and violence. The pro-abortion crowd gives them condoms and birth control pills. And even worse, textbooks and liberal education bureaucrats are selling our children the liberal political agenda. We need to do more to equip America's youth. We need to do more to let their voices speak the powerful truths to their peers and school officials.

American Values isn’t shy about proclaiming the need for moral values in restoring our nation. We work for a country where reliable standards of right and wrong matter again; where character counts; where virtue isn't seen as something old-fashioned but as something to treasure and pass on from one generation to another. We want America to be a country where once again women who choose to be mothers are not looked down upon or seen as being behind the times and wives are appreciated for their valuable contribution to America. We support measures that protect religious expression, restore the freedom of states to allow the acknowledgement of God in public places and allow the posting of the Ten Commandments in public buildings. We encourage and support the heroic work being done by churches, non-profit groups and people of faith and compassion to reach out to drug addicts, prisoners, at-risk children and women facing crisis pregnancies, and we support public policies that give faith-based organizations equal opportunity to apply for federal funding for these purposes.

We are convinced that, if we do these things, we can start to reverse the terrible trends we have seen in recent years, and we can once again be "the shining city upon a hill" that our founders envisioned.