It seems to me that we've got competing narratives going in Christian communities about whether our culture is getting worse or better morally. I've had a couple of conversations about this lately and also read Richard Beck's blog post about moral progress. So here goes:
Some people are convinced that our culture's morality has gone down the drain in the last 60 years or so. Culture's stance on sex seems to be a main issue for those who say things are getting progressively more evil. Nowadays premarital and extramarital sex are much more accepted than they were in 1950. The destabilization of the nuclear family, the decline of churchgoing, and the increased vocalization of atheism also feed into the claim that the moral climate has gotten much worse in the last decades.
However, other people cite instances of moral progress in the last decades. In 1950 it was much more culturally ok to refuse service to black people, to pay a woman less than a man to do the same job, to take over foreign nations to exploit their resources, to gunk up the environment irresponsibly, etc. While those things still happen now, they arguably happen less and provoke more moral outrage when they do. So there's also a case for saying we've had a real moral awakening as a culture.
Adherents to these two competing narratives (of decline and progress) are often members of opposing camps for other cultural, political, or religious reasons, and that polarization can make a mess of moral perception. There's a danger of pitting the two sets of virtues against each other rather than dealing with tensions between them intelligently and cooperatively. For example, adherents to the decline model may see initiatives to get better workplace conditions for women as a threat to the stability of the family. Conversely, adherents to the progress model may see emphasis on sexual morality as a continuation of double standards that have historically oppressed women. There are a lot of complicated questions to navigate here, but as it is there seems to be a lot more heckling and indignation than real attempts to sort out those questions. Because the moral questions are so entangled in other issues, people on both sides of those issues are liable to ignore or even disdain some real moral virtues for sociopolitical reasons.
I think this tendency to ignore some virtues should make thoughtful Christian folk skeptical of taking either model (decline or progress) too seriously. Chastity and social justice are both in Jesus' teachings. Denunciations and panegyrics about the culture these days may both be true, and they may sometimes be appropriate, but they're not the most helpful form of discourse to deal with the range of Christian virtues and the complexities of enacting them amid cultural debate.
(I've thoughts brewing for a post later on cultural morality vs. people's morality.)
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