Our great moral decline

ASKED to explain his support for Rick Santorum in Michigan's primary, voter Sandy Munro said, "Now what we need is a strong political leader to do something to get us out of the moral slump that we’re in."

Mr Santorum would agree, having noted that "Satan has his sights on the United States of America." As would Mitt Romney, who has attacked the decay caused by Barack Obama's "secular agenda". Newt Gingrich has gone the furthest, stating, “A country that has been now since 1963 relentlessly in the courts driving God out of public life shouldn’t be surprised at all the problems we have."

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Here's one for the declinists: the number of Americans not affiliated with any religion has increased, while the number of those attending worship services has declined. And here's another: out-of-wedlock births have increased in America so that now at least four in ten children are born to unmarried women. This is something Mr Santorum has focused on during the campaign, and he is right in pointing out that the children of unwed mothers in America tend to do worse in terms of health, schooling and income later in life.

But here's where the real debate over America's moral position comes into focus. As the New York Times notes, out-of-wedlock births are increasing in much of the developed world—for example, over half of babies in Iceland and Sweden are born to unwed mothers. But according to Wendy Manning, a professor of sociology at Bowling Green State University, "In Sweden, you see very little variation in the outcome of children based on marital status. Everybody does fairly well... In the US, there’s much more disparity."

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/03/morals