What to say to all this?
First, to give him his due, [Michael] Medved does provide an important corrective. In every age there are two extremes: Those who see nothing wrong with the times they live in, and those who see their times as hopeless.
We religious folks tend to fall into the second extreme. We romanticize history and forget that other ages were also marked by grievous sins: Feudalism was a nightmare system of oppression; the Industrial Revolution turned human beings into cogs; the casual racism of the beginning of the 20th century makes us wince when we glimpse it. We have abortion; our forefathers had slavery. We objectify women with pornography; others did it by denying them rights.
But second, the moral crisis we pointed to didn’t depend on rising teen sex rates. What about child sexual abuse? What about pornography? What about suicide rates? We did mention that casual sex is common from a young age, and I think that’s a justifiable thing to point out: The rates may have dropped, but calling their drop “dramatic” doesn’t change the fact that they are still very high.
And third, as Pope John Paul II and others have pointed out, the greatest sin in our day isn’t any particular sin, but the loss of the sense of sin.
[i] Feudalism was a nightmare system of oppression; the Industrial Revolution turned human beings into cogs [/i]
These lightweight generalizations are worthy of the sort of term paper one might write during a desperate all-nighter.