Has it dawned on you how much social change has occurred in your lifetime? Do you sometimes wonder if people younger than you really have a clue?
Hi, I’m Rex Rogers and this is episode #211 of Discerning What Is Best, a podcast applying unchanging biblical principles in a rapidly changing world, and a Christian worldview to current issues and everyday life.
Sometimes I hear middle-aged or young adults talk about contemporary events and politics and I think, do they understand how much has changed since I was a kid?
I guess the older you are the more that question hits home. I know that even thinking this way is an “old guy” thought. You know, “things just aren’t what they used to be.” But then again, they’re not.
I am older now, a Boomer, so I have memory and perspective reaching back sixty years to when I was a little kid. Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha have their own cultural moment and perspective, but by definition, it’s a shorter frame of reference.
Allow me to illustrate some of social changes that have occurred in my lifetime.
Without question, the most important shift is a culture-wide embrace of the idea that Morality, or if you prefer, truth is relative, the idea truth does not exist. When a culture rejects absolute truth, it is rejecting God who is truth and with this comes moral and intellectual bankruptcy. Part of this shift began with a century-long acceptance of evolution, or the theory life begins by chance, not from a creative act of God. Then facts give way to feelings as the source or definition of truth. Not absolute truth no matter if no one believes but just relative, malleable, socially constructed truth. Your truth, my truth, subjective truth.
All this may sound rather like vague philosophy, but the consequences of the assumption truth is relative are profound and easily now demonstrable for they are happening all around us.
If there is no absolute truth, there is no right and wrong, thus no evil. If there is no right and wrong or evil, then justice, law and order, the courts break down.
If there is no absolute truth, then education falls apart for it is all preference or meaninglessness, and loses its purpose, credibility, and incentive. Why pay tens of thousands of dollars for a degree in opinions? Or maybe worse, a degree based upon indoctrination rooted in what’s called Cultural Marxism, the reduction of everything to victimizer and victim, oppressor and oppressed?
If there is no truth, then hard science, real science disappears, and we’re left with “Believe the science” as political slogan. Why should anyone believe or trust science that is biased or partisan?
Without truth, an anchor over time and civilizations, words loose established meanings. Even the word truth itself can be bent for Orwellian reasons.
If moral certainty is no longer possible, and with it a rejection of common sense, we hear biased news agencies telling us not to believe our “lying eyes.”
Without moral absolutes, truth that guides us toward the better angels of our nature, we no longer possess parameters or guardrails for debate and discussion.
Any idea, no matter how morally bereft (and by the way, “moral” is one of those words that has lost all meaning, dependent upon the eye of the beholder), then we no longer possess the ability the debate. Now, to disagree is to hate. This leaves us with moral and intellectual nihilism, cul-de-sacs of our own making.
If no one can tell anyone else, including children, there is a better or morally uplifting way to do things, we get what we see now in the generations, perpetual adolescence. Thousands of youths don’t seem to grow up. When they hit the wall in life, and eventually everyone does, they have no back up, no safety net, nothing they believe in that forms a foundation for dealing with adversity. So, we get increased depression, anxiety, drop out, suicide rates.
Let’s consider some other things that are different now from when I was coming of age.
Conservation and responsible environmental stewardship have given way to the hocus pocus, bad science, globalist climate change. We should care for creation, and there are things human beings do, like littering or industrial waste, that degrade, but there is no existential threat. Climate change is far more about anti-capitalism and pro-government control than it is saving the environment.
Roe v Wade (1973) effectively legalized abortion nationally, which continued until it was overturned in 2022 by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, returning the authority to regulate or ban abortion to individual states. But abortions still take place. This resulted in a give or take 1 million abortions per year to the current total of 63 million plus.
When I was a kid, and into my college years, we experienced the Civil Rights Movement, led early on by Martin Luther King, Jr. Now, with Black Lives Matter and other racist advocacy groups, we’ve turned MLK, Jr. upside down. No longer are we interested in the content of one’s character but only in the color of one’s skin. This has yielded a new wave of desegregation and identity politics.
Since the Federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, intended to help a few native tribes, legalized, commercial and sports gambling have taken the country by storm. So, it’s difficult to believe that liberal Democrat, then US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, made a major policy speech on the evils of gambling and its threat to the general welfare. We’ve come a long way from this, now seeming to believe gambling is no big deal.
This goes along with our culture’s ever-increasing flirtation with debt. There was a time not long ago when leaders understood budgets must balance or there will eventually be bad times, but this is not the case in government.
From the 2000s onward, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, tax cuts, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic, produced major surges in both absolute debt and debt-to-GDP ratio. The U.S. national debt is over $36 trillion, with a debt-to-GDP ratio exceeding 120%, approaching WWII levels.
But it is more than this, the real reason debt has surged is that it has become accepted, no longer considered much of a threat, a can that can be kicked down the road in perpetuity. If you don’t believe debt has been accepted, think about how much criticism has been leveled at DOGE, an effort to identify waste, fraud, and abuse. Pro-debt is a philosophy of big government profligacy, the same dangerous view that motivates problem gamblers, the idea that the piper will never have to be paid. Problem is, this defies all we know about debt in human history wherein many great empires were brought to their knees as much by crushing debt as by barbarians at the gate.
There was a time when marijuana was considered as much a drug as any other narcotic, maybe not as threatening as cocaine or now fentanyl, but a drug nonetheless, so it was regulated. As of February 2025, 24 states, the District of Columbia, and three U.S. territories have legalized recreational marijuana.
Problem is, recreational marijuana is still a drug with negative effects like memory impairment, reduced attention and concentration, impaired judgment and coordination increasing risk of accidents, e.g. while driving, risk of anxiety, paranoia, or panic attacks, increased risk of psychosis or schizophrenia, depression and motivational issues, threat to brain development in adolescents.
When I was a kid Dad talked to me about the birds and the bees. He did not struggle speaking of the differences in a man and a woman, nor did Grandpa up on the farm. Sex was straight forward, a creation of God, a blessing but something that if ill-used could bring hurt to people’s lives. Now we live in a supposedly non-binary world wherein LGBTQ+ individuals pursue same-sex marriages, even legal adoptions. The confusion this introduces in our society is near limitless, and I’m not sure we’ve yet seen the extent of its negative repercussions.
We seem to think our ideas have no consequences, that we can ignore eternal principles and verities that have guided all previous civilizations. This is foolish, even arrogant.
When I was a kid, common sense made sense. Now, we live in a theater of the absurd that celebrates irrationality. So, now more than ever we should remember,
“So, Jesus said…“If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (Jn. 8:31-32).
Well, we’ll see you again soon. This podcast is about Discerning What Is Best. If you find this thought-provoking and helpful, follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Download an episode for your friends. For more Christian commentary, check my website, r-e-x-m as in Martin, that’s rexmrogers.com. Or check my YouTube channel @DrRexRogers for more podcasts and video.
And remember, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2025
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