Where Have You Gone Sociology?

Romans 12:  2  “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God.”  

 As a sociology major in undergraduate school, we were excited to enroll in that esteemed sociologist professor Larry Connell's class called 'Social Disorganization'. We were young students and enthusiastic to learn about the social forces effecting deviant subcultures, delinquency, drug abuse, sexual immorality, prostitution, family discord and divorce. Now such college courses are almost nonexistent. Why ? It would blow the cover of today's college liberal elite who actually promote such discord and insist there is no deviancy - referred to as 'defining deviancy down' or 'cultural relativity'.  Instead, America's Marxist professors attack religion, that regulatory force helping maintain cultural norms and even target once normal behavior as deviant - going to church, family life, romance, sexuality, etc.  I remember speaking with a colleague once [she categorized herself as a rabid feminist].  At a time when Kathy Lee Gifford was popular, she said feminists hated her. “Why,” I asked.  She said, “because she loved her husband.”  Need I say more?  I will.  

 Cultural relativism is that social and psychological view that there are no absolutes, that morality is in the eye of the beholder, that what is right is determined by whatever culture one identifies with.  No time for Christianity here.  

In my own sociology classes taught at a local college here in W. Palm Beach, Fl, I usually began the course with an investigation of the research of esteemed anthropologist Margaret Mead.  She wrote a classic in 1928, “Coming of Age in Samoa.”  Rather than an objective view of Samoan culture, it was finally realized some 55 years lat that Mead was describing a culture that did not exist.   She tried to describe a culture of lax sexual mores, more in keeping with her own beliefs.  An agnostic, the Mead agenda was that culture, not science or religion determined morality and acceptable behavior, and she found such a culture on the other side of the globe helping to support her views.  This was a turning point in both anthropology and sociology promoting cultural relativity as a more legitimate perspective for modern times.

 Catholicism on the other hand teaches to live a culture according to Christ and obey the commandments.  Creating a Catholic culture is to live in the world but not of it.  Our behavior is to follow the moral truths we have been taught and heed the call of Pope Benedict VXI to “wield Jesus Christ as a shield against the dictatorship of moral relativism” in our society.  Paraphrased, be not conformed to the culture of this world but of the culture of Christ -  a standard of behavior unacceptable and not taught in sociology classes.  

 John 14:  6  Jesus said to him, “ I am the way, and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the father except through me.”