I used to be in a choir and remember our Director bringing up “The Preacher’s Wife” one day in practice. I just watched it for the first time with Whitney Houston’s other movies. One of the songs on the soundtrack was a regular part of our setlist and it brought back a lot of memories. The same year Joan Osborne had a song on radio and MTV asking the question what if God was just an ordinary man? When this track was brought up in conversation one of the pastor’s kids was adamant that she shouldn’t ask questions like that.
I thought how weird that there are questions you are not supposed to ask. Osborne was twice our age and almost certainly knew more than what our high school education could cover. I knew that questioning is one of the main ways we learn about the world. Much later I discovered Street Epistemology which uses the Socratic method. A person well trained in one on one interactions in this approach can lead to incredible insights! There was just a new course started on learning how to practice SE called Navigating Beliefs.
The choir song that really changed its meaning to me these days is “The Basics of Life” by the group 4Him. It was about the need for society to return to “the virtues that once gave us light” and how “we’ve drifted so far from the truth.” It tries to convince listeners that there was some other time when when morality was much better than current day. It is this generation, according them, which is so far off base to the point that they just can’t even understand the most basic of ethics anymore. The lyrics don’t get into detail for specifics on when this time was so it comes with all the vagueness of a slogan like “Make America Great Again.”
When was this “again” the political slogan refers to? Your guess is as good as mine. What era was the songwriter of “Basics of Life” talking about when of these “morals that governed our lives” and when did they erode? The vagueness actually works as a feature since you can fill in your own answer into the blank. If they listed an exact time it might contradict what the audience wants to believe but when the line is structured this way it now coincides with what was already thought to be correct. I think there should be a detailed explanation to this supposed era. It seems to be rooted in our preconceived collective imaginations and nowhere else.