Of every chapter in this volume, this was the hardest to write. Gallup’s long-running surveys on the state of American morality show a steady, unmistakable decline, and the decline touches nearly everything: honesty, family stability, sexual ethics, corruption, violence. It is a strange paradox of our age that knowledge and technology keep accelerating while morality keeps eroding—a pattern Scripture anticipated long ago: “every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time” (Genesis 6:5). This chapter walks through several of the clearest signs of that decline, not to despair over them, but to name them honestly before turning, at the end, toward what a genuine answer looks like.

Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing

This subject is personal for me. My grandmother named me after her husband’s brother, Setrag Sahakian, a teacher hanged in 1915 for the crime of being an educated Armenian during the Armenian Genocide—the atrocity that gave the modern world the very word “genocide,” coined by Raphael Lemkin after his own encounter with reports of Ottoman crimes against Armenians. Between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians died in that campaign; Turkey still refuses to acknowledge it as genocide, and in 2023 Armenians endured a second ethnic cleansing when Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey, forcibly emptied Nagorno-Karabakh of its Armenian population with barely a murmur from the watching world.

The list since has never really stopped: the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Srebrenica, Darfur, the Yazidi and Rohingya genocides, the ongoing Uyghur ethnic cleansing in China. More recently, reports out of Nigeria describe over 125,000 Christians killed and roughly 19,000 churches burned by Islamist militants since 2009—a crisis serious enough that it drew public attention from voices as different as commentator Bill Maher and, more recently, statements from the Trump administration weighing possible action. Impunity is the common thread: when perpetrators are never held to account, as Turkey’s century of denial shows, the pattern simply repeats elsewhere.

Wars Without End

Jesus told His disciples plainly that “wars and rumors of wars” would mark the age before His return, and warned them not to be alarmed by it (Matthew 24:6–8). The historical record bears this out starkly: of the last 3,400 years, humanity has been entirely at peace for only about 268 of them—roughly 8 percent of recorded history. The twentieth century’s wars alone killed over 100 million people. Today the Russia–Ukraine war grinds on with staggering losses on both sides, while civil wars continue to devastate places like Sudan and Myanmar. I lived through the first four years of Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war as a child; my family’s business in Beirut was destroyed, and it was one of the reasons I eventually left for the United States. War, whether between nations or within them, remains one of humanity’s oldest and least-learned lessons.

Abortion and an Ancient Parallel

Since Roe v. Wade in 1973, roughly 60 million abortions have been performed in the United States alone, and an estimated one billion worldwide. From its earliest days, the Church stood unambiguously against this: the second-century Didache instructed believers, “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion,” and Tertullian argued that ending a life already forming in the womb was no different morally than ending one already born. Psalm 139 describes God “knitting together” each person in the womb, “fearfully and wonderfully made,” a theological claim that any argument about when life technically “begins” tends to sidestep rather than answer.

Scripture also records a chilling ancient parallel: child sacrifice to Molech and Baal, practices God says never entered His mind to command (Jeremiah 19:5) and explicitly condemned (Leviticus 18:21, 20:2). Historians studying ancient Carthage note that child sacrifice there was often tied to crisis pregnancies, social pressure, and even the sacrifice of children with disabilities in hope of “better” ones to follow—patterns that, whatever one makes of the comparison, are difficult to read today without discomfort.

Corruption, Public and Private

Scripture is blunt about bribery and corrupted justice: “a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous” (Deuteronomy 16:19). I’ve seen its effects up close in two countries I know well. Armenia’s seventy years under Soviet rule left corruption so deeply embedded that, decades after independence, university faculty were still requesting courses in basic ethics to help repair what communism had corroded. Lebanon’s story is sadder still: more than twenty-five political assassinations without a single conviction, a 2020 port explosion that killed over 200 people with no one yet held accountable, and a banking collapse that saw ordinary depositors—including my own family—lose their life savings while the connected elite quietly moved their money abroad first.

The West is hardly exempt. Corporate scandals from Enron and WorldCom to Theranos and FTX have repeatedly shown that fraud on a massive scale is not a developing-world problem alone—it simply wears a more sophisticated suit. And as noted in the previous chapter, some of the same corporations happy to tout progressive values at home have proven willing to hand consumer data to regimes like China’s in exchange for market access, whatever the human cost to persecuted minorities there.

The Fraying of Family and Culture

There is a real, measurable shift between the family-centered television of a generation or two ago—Leave It to Beaver, The Andy Griffith Show, Everybody Loves Raymond—and much of today’s programming, where dysfunction, profanity, and instability are the default setting rather than the exception. Pope John Paul II’s observation still lands: “As the family goes, so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live.” Popular culture doesn’t just reflect a society’s values; over time, it reshapes them.

Sexual Immorality and Its Cost

John Wesley warned centuries ago that “what one generation tolerates, the next generation will embrace,” and the trajectory since has largely proven him right. Surveys of even church-attending teenagers show sexual activity rates alarmingly close to the general population, with researchers pointing to a simple cause: television, peers, and film shape young people’s understanding of sexuality far more than parents or Scripture do. None of this is offered to shame anyone caught in these patterns—Scripture is equally clear that sexual sin, whatever form it takes, is never beyond the reach of grace and forgiveness. But naming the trend honestly is the first step toward addressing it.

A Hard Word on LGBTQIA+ and “Social Justice”

This is among the most sensitive subjects in the book, and I want to be as clear and as careful as possible. James 1:27 frames true religion as caring for “orphans and widows in their affliction,” while keeping “oneself unstained from the world”—justice for the vulnerable, held together with moral clarity. The traditional, historic Christian reading of Scripture—reflected in passages like Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:26–27, and 1 Corinthians 6:9–11—has consistently placed homosexual practice within the category of sexual sin the gospel calls all people to be transformed out of, alongside greed, dishonesty, and a long list of other struggles named in the same passages. My own conviction, laid out plainly in the source material for this chapter, is that no reading of Scripture supports affirming this practice as compatible with Christian discipleship, however that conclusion is received.

What I want to resist, just as strongly, is the idea that this conviction should ever be paired with contempt for people. The gospel’s whole logic is that Christ loves sinners enough to die for them—every sinner, including the one writing this. The goal was never exclusion; it was always the same invitation extended to everyone: repentance, transformation, and full entry into God’s Kingdom. Whatever one’s view of this chapter’s argument, that invitation is the point that matters most.

Child Trafficking

Modern slavery is not a historical footnote—the International Labour Organization estimates 49.6 million people remain trapped in it today, 12 million of them children, generating an estimated $150 billion a year, much of it through sex trafficking. The 2023 film Sound of Freedom, based on the true story of former federal agent Tim Ballard’s efforts to rescue trafficked children, brought welcome public attention to a problem that thrives specifically because it stays hidden. Its closing line stays with me: there are more people enslaved today than at any other point in history, including when slavery was legally sanctioned.

A Way Forward

James 1:27 remains the clearest summary of the balance this chapter has tried to hold: visit the orphan and the widow, and stay unstained by the world. Obedience, not mere ritual, is what Samuel told Saul God actually wants—”to obey is better than sacrifice” (1 Samuel 15:22)—and obedience only makes sense once trust in God’s goodness comes first, exactly as the old hymn puts it: “trust and obey, for there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus.”

History’s pattern is consistent: real revival always produces both personal transformation and social reform together—the abolition of slavery, the founding of hospitals and orphanages, the closing of dens of vice, all flowed out of hearts changed first by the Holy Spirit. That remains the answer this chapter points toward: not new legislation or new ideology, but the old, unglamorous work of hearts turned back to God, one at a time.