Some point to indoctrination in the education system. What is driving this downward spiral? The answer may be multifaceted. respondents raised their esteem of money as “very important” from 31% in 1998 to 43% in 2023. The poll also revealed that only one value amongst the values surveyed increased in importance to Americans: money. “These differences are so dramatic, it paints a new and surprising portrait of a changing America.” McInturff said. If this trend continues, 35% of the population could be all that remains by 2070 of the current 64% who identify as Christian.īill McInturff, a pollster from the original NBC News survey in 1998, voiced this alarming departure from American values. Today, only 39% concur.Ī Pew Research Center study from 2022 found that Americans are also leaving Christianity at a steady rate. In 1998, 62% of respondents ranked religion as very important to them. The value that was once attached to religion has also steeply declined. Seventy-eight percent of respondents did not feel confident that their children would lead better lives than they did. Only 23% of young adults under the age of 30 responded that having children was very important to them. The importance attached to having children, a societal necessity, has fallen from 59% in 1998 to 30% in 2023. According to a recent Morning Consult poll, a mere 16% of Generation Z is proud to call themselves American. But what does any of this have to do with America today?Ī new poll from The Wall Street Journal in conjunction with the National Opinion Research Center, a nonpartisan research group, uncovered shocking new statistics regarding American attitudes toward values like patriotism, religion, and having children.Īccording to the survey, 38% of respondents said that patriotism was very important to them, a 32-point decrease from a similar poll conducted in 1998. While historians disagree over the composition of Rome’s collapse, moral degeneration is frequently cited. “No longer confronted by the external threat, Romans could relax and give themselves up instead to greed, luxury, and personal ambition.” British historian Barbara Levick wrote in 1982: Roman statesmen like Sallust, Livy, and Cicero attributed the collapse of the Western Roman Empire to moral relaxation. In fact, what precedes a nation’s collapse is arguably more important. Zedekiah, the twentieth and final king of Judah, watched as his sons were killed in front of him, then he was blinded so that their deaths would be the last thing he ever saw before being led away in chains.

Much earlier, Jerusalem was sacked by the Babylonians.

In 410 AD, Alaric the Visigoth infamously sacked the once indomitable city of Rome. Harvard professor George Santayana in his work “The Life of Reason” famously wrote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Many believe a utopia on earth can be achieved. Mankind builds towers into the clouds, aspiring to reach heaven apart from God. History retraces the paths of nations rising and falling.

Ozymandias dc