Posted June 05, 2026
Throughout much of this week, Dr. Jim Denison’s Daily Articles have focused on issues of morality in the culture while providing guidance on how to embrace a more biblical system of values amid pressure to do otherwise. It’s an important conversation, particularly because our culture has little hope of embracing Christ’s teachings if Christians aren’t doing so first.
I must admit, though, the transition from reading each morning’s articles to diving into the day’s news shortly thereafter has felt particularly jarring.
It’s not necessarily that this week has seen an abnormal influx of people rejecting biblical values, though examples have not been hard to find. After all, stories to that effect are present every day.
Rather, I think the juxtaposition of this week’s theme in the Daily Article with the news of what’s happening in our culture and our world has stood out because it’s made me wonder how much our culture still cares about morality in the first place.
The latest polling shows that people at least claim to be concerned. A record-high 56 percent of Americans say the country’s moral values are “poor,” which is up from 44 percent last year. Moreover, 80 percent say that values are getting worse.
And, for the first time since Gallup started collecting this data, majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and Independents all agreed that moral values are poor, making disappointment in American morality one of the few issues where we can seem to agree with one another.
Identifying the problem is of little help if we can’t come up with a solution, though, and the data is disappointing on this front as well.
The most frustrating part of these statistics on the state of morality in our culture is where the bulk of Americans appear to place their hope for help. For decades—and this holds for both Republicans and Democrats—those who favor the party in power have looked to the government for help, while those on the other side of the aisle have looked to our leaders for someone to blame. And it flips as soon as the party in office changes.
Most recently, for example, 73 percent of Republicans rated the morals of the country as poor in the last year of President Biden’s term, while only 28 percent of Democrats agreed. Fast forward a year, and suddenly only 37 percent of Republicans maintained that belief while an extra 20 percent of Democrats were concerned.
That those trends have leveled off this year, with a mere five points of difference between the mutually pessimistic parties, is a historical anomaly, but one that actually gives me a measure of hope for our culture going forward.
You see, the degree to which these statistics shift abruptly based on nothing more than a political election seems like excellent proof that we’re looking in the wrong places for our moral compass and hope for a better future. That a majority of people from every party now believe our sense of values is poor and getting worse could actually be a sign that perhaps the general public has become sufficiently disillusioned to start looking beyond our political leaders for answers.
If so, that’s a space where Christians should be able to help. And the story of Ben Sasse offers some guidance on how we can do just that.
We’ve talked about Ben Sasse and his battle with cancer a few times in this space already, but a recent article by John McCormack in The Dispatch gives a powerful reminder of why his story has resonated with so many people. As McCormack describes, “Sasse’s pain is all too real. But so is the joy that he finds in his family, his friends, his work, and, most of all, in God and the promise of eternal life.”
He goes on to describe how Sasse is dying in public, “at a time when euthanasia—called ‘medical aid in dying’ by advocates—is on the rise in Canada and the United States. Sasse’s example of ‘redeeming the time’ amid physical pain and a terminal diagnosis provides a different vision of what death with dignity actually looks like.”
The article ends with a quote from one of Sasse’s favorite books, Augustine’s City of God:
The same fire that makes gold shine makes chaff smoke. . . What matters is the nature of the sufferer, not the nature of the sufferings.
The reason so many are drawn to Sasse in his final days is the manner in which the gold of his faith is shining through in the midst of his suffering. There’s an authenticity to the way he’s approaching the end of his life that speaks to a sense of purpose and strength that inspires. Yet, it would all ring hollow if there wasn’t a foundation of faith and virtue beneath it.
So, as we finish our discussion, let’s go back to the question at the start of today’s article. Do Americans still want to be a moral people?
I think the answer is yes, but as a culture, we’ve simply lost our compass for how to do that. It’s why so many look to politicians, celebrities, or even friends and family for guidance on where to draw the line between right and wrong, even though Scripture is clear that Jesus is the only standard we need (Ephesians 5:1–2).
When I was growing up, W.W.J.D. bracelets, which stood for What Would Jesus Do?, were enormously popular. The question was simple, and the bracelets often became more of an accessory than a genuine source of accountability. However, there are far worse ways to discern right from wrong than asking the perfect Son of God what he thinks.
As George Macdonald once quipped, “God never gave a man a thing to do, concerning which it were irreverent to ponder how the Son of God would have done it.”
As Christians, we’re meant to go through every day as the living embodiment of that truth. Our lives should serve as the moral compass that can point people back to Jesus, and our values should mirror his own to such an extent that “What Would Jesus Do?” is intricately woven into the fabric of every decision that we make.
If we want to see our culture care about morality again—and I believe, on some level, most still want to—they have to see it in us first. That means every single decision you or I will make today should point people back to God, and there is no area of our life—be it politics, work, or anything else—that gets a pass on that standard.
How well will you live out that calling today?
“The virtue of courage is a prerequisite for the practice of all other virtues, otherwise one is virtuous only when virtue has no cost.” —C. S. Lewis
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