Hast thou well considered all that Habit does in this life of ours?"

From The End of Premarital Sex by Eve Tushnet.

Freitas found that students at evangelical Christian colleges were often the exception to the inarticulate rule. Freitas criticized many aspects of Christian college culture, but she was impressed by the degree to which these students, almost alone among their peers, were able to think clearly about the intersection of ethics and desire.

I am reading a couple of other books right now, The De-Moralization of Society by Gertrude Himmelfarb which looks at the modern faulty interpretation of Victorian morality. Himmelfarb's basic message is that the shallow modern glib assessment is that Victorians were a bunch of hypocrites because they failed to fully practice the moral goals to which they held others accountable. Himmelfarb's point is that they are not hypocritical when they also hold themselves accountable for their own shortfalls from the moral ideal. Page 26, discussing William Gladstone's diaries.

But the diaries are also (like Carlyle's memoirs, or Mill's autobiography, or Eliot's letters) sobering. For they remind us that the eminent Victorians were not only eminently human, with all the failings and frailties of the species, but also eminently moral. They did not take sin lightly - their own or anyone' else's. If they were censorious of others, they were also guilt-ridden about themselves. They were not hypocrites in the sense of pretending to be more virtuous than they were. On the contrary, they deliberately, even obsessively, confessed their sins. If they did not all punish themselves quite in the manner of Gladstone, they did suffer in private and behave as best they could in public. They affirmed, in effect, the principles of morality even if they could not always act in accordance with those principles.

I am also reading Three Empires on the Nile (the British Empire and Egypt in the Sudan in the late 1800's) by Dominic Green which has this to say about the interesting confluence of commercial opportunity, religious/moral fervor and scientific excitement at the end of the nineteenth century:

The third factor blended economic optimism and the Evangelical urgency with another aspect of the Victorian mentality. Africa was a mystery, and this, the age of Darwin, Sherlock Holmes, and the crossword puzzle, was the great age of problem solving. Even the Africans had no idea how many Great Lakes their continent contained, which mountain was the highest, which river the longest. This blankness was an affront to science. For, apart from being the age of popular religion, this was also an age of popular science.

Add to the mix my thoughts during the sermon in church today which was based on the reading from Corinthians (1 Corinthians 13:1-13). The priest made the point that this is one of the most popular passages in the Bible, particularly for those about to marry and that it is challenging to render the reading fresh because of its popularity.

My train of thought was along the lines of volume. Americans are by far the most religious members of the OECD community. Acknowledging that Americans attend church but not every Sunday, let's assume that most Americans hear 20 sermons a year. By the time they have reached 50, they have heard roughly 1,000 deep meditations on a variety of complex and abstract moral issues. That would be roughly the equivalent of a degree in theology or philosophy. That is a huge amount of cognitive investment which is rewarding, useful, and completely beneath the radar.

To Tushnet's point, one of the consequences of the secularization of society is not just the erosion of common moral principles and values but potentially an encroaching ignorance. If, for whatever reason, you are not thinking about important things, you are unlikely to have reasoned views and opinions. Tushnet again:

The second important point is that although Regnerus and Uecker build a strong case that they have discerned many of the underlying foundations of young adults’ sexual ethics, when the people themselves were asked to explain the beliefs behind their sexual choices they found it extraordinarily difficult. Their sentences became garbled and rambling, full of shamefaced backtracking (“It’s one of those things. It’s not, I’m sure I’m just justifying, but it’s something that I’m really, I don’t know, I can’t say for us. I know I’m speaking a horribly illogical argument”) and acknowledged self-contradictions. Donna Freitas found the same phenomenon among the college students she worked with in her 2008 study, Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance and Religion on America’s College Campuses. These bright, articulate young adults turned into Raymond Carver characters when they were asked to describe the beliefs underlying their sexual behavior—especially how those beliefs related to their religious faith.

As Thomas Carlyle said in History of the French Revolution, "Rash enthusiast of change, beware! Hast thou well considered all that Habit does in this life of ours?"

Park the issue of the majority of people not being "able to think clearly about the intersection of ethics and desire." What happens when people are not able to think clearly about ethics or simply choose not to do so.