Episode 25 – Losing Our Way: A Gen Z Look at America’s Moral Drift

In this episode of The Reagan Faulkner Show, Reagan traces how American culture shifted from faith, family, and wholesome media to a landscape dominated by anti‑Christian messaging, DEI tokenism, radical gender ideology, and sexualized entertainment—even in children’s programming. She contrasts classic shows, films, ads, and church‑centered family life with today’s violence‑filled movies, woke television, and the erosion of clear gender roles and respect for motherhood. She also highlights the sharp decline in church attendance and Christian identity since the mid‑20th century, tying it to major Supreme Court decisions that removed prayer, religious symbols, and the Ten Commandments from public schools under a distorted reading of “separation of church and state.”​

Reagan then connects the Cultural Revolution, sexual revolution, changing university culture, and modern immigration policy to the normalization of hookup culture, LGBTQ ideology, Marxism, and third‑worldist attitudes that clash with traditional American values. She argues that refugee and TPS policies have imported large communities that often do not assimilate or share Christian foundations, while universities indoctrinate students into secular, anti‑faith worldviews. Framing the clash between Bad Bunny’s halftime show and Turning Point USA’s faith‑focused alternative as a symbol of the national divide, she calls on Gen Z conservatives to lobby legislators and schools, get politically engaged, and actively work to reclaim American and Christian culture before the country crosses a point of no return.

Transcript

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What's up guys and welcome back to the Reagan Faulkner Show. Today we're going to be talking about culture and the shift that we've seen in American culture over the last 100 years. I thought this would be a really interesting topic given the clash that we saw between the standard halftime show with Bad Bunny and the Turning Point USA halftime show that really put faith, family, and freedom at the center of the stage. So let's go ahead and hop right into this moral drift that we have seen in American culture over the last 100 years. So, obviously culture used to be one of America's strongest representations of our national identity. We'll hop into a few examples here, but think about television classics like Leave it to Beaver and the Andy Griffith Show that taught morality and wisdom and there was always a feel-good message at the end. You never felt empty, you never felt like there was more to it. You never felt sad or depressed. There was always a happy ending to it. Think about movies like Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Even It's a Wonderful Life. These movies really showcased talent. They showcased expert storytelling and to a degree there was some semblance of a moral idea, a moral background, wisdom, something where you you left that movie feeling like it wasn't an utter and complete waste of your time. Think about just wholesome, basic consumer advertisements for things like Coke and there were just no underlying messages, no DEI. It was just it was just an ad that would make you want to buy a soda. Think about the weight that was placed on gender roles back then and I'm not talking about men belong at work and women belong in the kitchen or anything like that. I'm talking about specifically what it meant to be a certain gender. There were certain ideas placed on men and women and there were only men and women. There were two genders and nobody questioned that but for women, women were mothers, they were caregivers, they were the person that children in the household would go to for help and support and men were the providers. They were teaching their sons how to treat women. They were teaching them how to be brave, how to work hard and how to lead with morals and values when they grew up into young men one day. Think about our Christian culture back in the day, back in the 1950s and 40s and just think about how our culture resembled that we were a Christian nation from our inception, from the time the Pilgrims landed here in the 1620s to escape persecution over in Europe and all the way up until 1776 and when we declared independence, when we passed our Constitution, we had families that would go to church every single Sunday. Young girls would volunteer in Sunday school and learn how to be caretakers and teachers and prayer was still said in public classrooms when the Ten Commandments were hanging on the wall. Now, compare this to what we're seeing today. Hollywood movies are riddled with violence, fear, poor messaging and always, always, always a reliance on that one DEI character that has to be in there whether it's an action movie, a rom-com or an animated children's movie. Think about how television shows are riddled with anti-Christian messaging, anti-conservative messaging, messaging about poor morals and poor values, messaging that goes against American values and traditions and they also always have that one DEI character that pops up for I don't know what reason. They're just always kind of there. Not that I have a problem with having a different ethnic character, racial character. It's just like when you shove it in there and it doesn't even go with the plot. It's just weird. Now, think about how children's shows are showcasing transgenderism and gay characters and non-binary characters and taking away what it means to be a girl and a boy and they're too young to understand this. This is being shown to three, four, five-year-olds, even ten or twelve-year-olds, kids that don't even know what it means to go on a date or to have a crush. How can they be expected to understand these topics and not become confused and not become brainwashed over this? Think about our television ads right now. They're just absolutely littered with medications and AIDS treatment and birth control and alcohol and things that wouldn't have represented our society a mere 60 or 70 years ago, arguably even 50 years ago. Think about gender roles today. Quite frankly, we don't have any because men can be women and women can be men. Women can now support the household while men stay home. Personally, that's fine if that's what a woman wants to be, but it's very different than what we saw just 50 or 80 years ago. Think about how women aren't even considered mothers anymore. The fundamental meaning of being a woman to bring new life into the world and that's been stripped away from us because mothers are now called birth-giving persons by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Now in a religious perspective, this is coming from a study that Gallup produced, only 21% of Americans attend some form of church or religious worship every week. Now this can be people outside of Christians, but that's 21% of religious individuals attending worship weekly. Now, Christians are doing a little bit better than the national average. 30% of Protestant Christians attend church every week. So that's a little bit better than our national average for all religions, but compare this to 1956. In 1956, 96% of Americans identified as Christians. Even in 1998, which really isn't that long ago in the grand scheme of things, that's not even 30 years ago, 86% of Americans identified as Christian. Now, when this research study was published, it was 2023, so that's the last number that I have here, but in 2023, only 68% of Americans identified as Christian. That's a big drop in about 30 years. That's a pretty dramatic drop right there. So what happened? What changed where we see this decline from the 50s to the 90s, slight decline, and then this major decline from the 90s to present day today? We're gonna dive into the history of a lot of policies and legal actions that have shaped where we are now and then, like I said, next week, we are going to talk about what you can do to bring standard American culture and Christian culture back to the United States before it's too late. So first, we're gonna jump into legal challenges. This is one of the main reasons that we've seen such a decline in Christians and Christianity within our culture in the last couple of decades. So in 1962, that was when prayer was removed from public schools. That was a result of the Supreme Court case Ingle v. Vitale, which ruled it unconstitutional to have prayer in public schools. Now, in 1971, we have another Supreme Court case called Lemon v. Kurtzman, which produced the Lemon Test. Now, the Lemon Test was what basically took away religious symbolism from public places. It declared that a three-part test had to be applied to anything that would be considered religious that was in a public property. So this went towards nativity scenes, crosses. It could be religious things that weren't Christian, but typically it was applied to Christian symbolism. So the first test or portion of the test had to be, is this image or symbol secular in nature? Is it being used to advance a secular purpose? Now, when we think of religious materials, we think of the complete opposite of secularism. So that's a very interesting first point of a three-part test. The second purpose is, the primary part or the second point is that the primary purpose must not be to either advance or inhibit religion. So it cannot make people more religious. It cannot be trying to make them more religious. It cannot be attacking any other religion or trying to inhibit religion. And then the third piece is that it cannot foster excessive government entanglement with religion. So basically it cannot put religion and government too close together and get them all like stirred up and confused with each other. And that was under the idea of the separation of church and state. But the separation of church and state isn't even in any of our founding documents. Actually, it's found in a letter from Thomas Jefferson, I believe, to the Danbury Church basically saying that he would not approve of a specific sect of Christian religion. He wouldn't endorse any specific form of the Christian religion, whether it's Catholicism or Protestantism or any specific type of it. So it's not, it was to protect religions from the state, not to protect the state from religion. So that's a huge misconception that came during this period of all of these different Supreme Court cases because it was what they applied. It was one of the things that they applied when making this decision when it's not even fundamentally true in the way that they're presenting it. Now in 1980, that was when the Ten Commandments were removed from public school classrooms as a result of the Supreme Court case Stone v. Graham. Now, I make the argument that this is probably the time when we really see society degrading, when we start taking the Ten Commandments out of classes because there is nothing inherently, there is inherent religion to the Ten Commandments. Let me revise what I was gonna say. There is, you know, it is a Christian document. It's also found in the Jewish religion. We see the Ten Commandments in multiple religions, but the the primary, what's really in the Ten Commandments, I guess you could say, is genuine morals. Don't steal. Don't lie. Don't cheat. Don't disrespect your parents or your elders. Don't kill people. Don't cheat on your spouse. Very baseline moral things that we should all genuinely, generally believe in. We should all generally agree with with the basic things in the Ten Commandments. Again, if regardless of what religion you're in, probably only worship the God of your religion. Like, very, very baseline morals and ethics in this. So I believe personally that when this was taken out of school in 1980, there were a lot of children that were growing up in the U.S. that they might not be being taught morals or values or ethics at home, but they would see this on the wall. They'd be like, hmm, maybe I shouldn't lie. Maybe I shouldn't steal. Maybe I shouldn't cheat on my girlfriend or my husband or my wife. Maybe I shouldn't kill people. Very, very baseline morals. When you took that out, kids whose parents don't teach that, that don't go to church or some form of worship, they're obviously not going to have any any, like, probability or ability to engage with these ideas and these topics. They just grow up, and they genuinely don't know that they probably shouldn't do these things. I think that was probably one of the biggest pieces where we saw our moral shift as a society, at least in terms of what we hold in our hearts and how we behave. Now, next we have the Cultural Revolution, which I argue is the second biggest thing. This kind of coincides with Christianity. When you lose Christianity, the Cultural Revolution may look more appealing. So in the 1960s, yes, this is a little bit before those Supreme Court cases, but when we get into the 90s and 2000s, it kind of all snowballs. So there was a social movement, i.e. the Cultural Revolution. Now, not the Cultural Revolution of China. This is a different one that took place in America, but this Cultural Revolution rejected tradition and conventional norms. It basically said, instead of doing the things that I have traditionally done, that families have traditionally done, that Americans have traditionally done for the last 100 years, let me just do the utter and complete opposite of that. So drugs like LSD were normalized, and it also laid the foundation for the sexual revolution of the 1960s, which led to the legalization of contraceptives, including oral birth control. Now, again, I'm not saying that I think that birth control should be illegal, oral birth control, any form of contraceptives. That's not my argument whatsoever. The argument here is just that it made hookup culture a lot easier, which is something that today we have a huge problem with. So it also enhanced and advanced the LGBTQ agenda and ideology and acceptance of those things because people were coming out of the closet, and they were feeling that it was more comfortable to engage in this, what they called, sexual liberation, and I guess experiment would be a good word for it. And then, finally, it began the acceptance of out-of-sex-before-marriage and hookup culture, like I said, when you legalize the contraceptives. Again, don't have a problem with the legalization of it, but the consequence of that is something that's really not great for our culture. So, those two really brought in lack of morals, lack of Christian values, and then the advancement of our hookup culture and a lot of the things that we see in TV and a lot of the woke ideas that are being placed into places of education that most conservatives disagree with. Now, we also have universities, which really kind of backed all of this up with education, you could say, with a new idea of how education should be given to Americans. So, according to the National Center of Education Statistics, 45.1% of Americans attended college in 1960. So, that's not a lot. That's less than half. Now, in 1998, that number rose to 65.6%. The really important thing here is that, in 1960, people that were in college were in college before all of these cultural revolutions, all of these Supreme Court cases. They were going to college and they were genuinely getting an education to become a lawyer, become a doctor, and go into some useful field of study. This was before the civil rights legislation came out and before we had DEI centers and things like that. People were actually going to school for useful things, to get useful jobs, to actually contribute to society. Now, when it rose in 1998, this was after we were seeing riots in California, the advancement of DEI, the affirmative action, things like that. So, a college degree, more people were going, but the value of your education was lowering. They were starting to introduce degrees and things that just weren't useful. Again, DEI degrees and things like that. So, college attendance was rising, but your ROI on college was probably declining, and that's really when indoctrination started becoming common in universities across our country. Now, colleges also teach what's called an empirical way of thinking. This can be defined as based on or concerned with or verifiable by observation or experience, rather than theory or pure logic. So, basically what this means is that teaching and knowledge is based on things that you can see, that you can touch, that are tangible, and that are proven. It's education is not based on theory. Theory is not applicable, or even like pure logic isn't applicable, you know, finding if A, then B, obviously C. You have to be able to touch it, observe it, feel it, and verify that it's actually there. Now, this rebukes the idea of faith, which is a very important concept to Christianity and many other religions, which again, we look at that 1998, that's when we had the last kind of good amount of people in America that were Christians, that last solid percentage, and then it drastically decreased, and it drastically decreased as we see college on the rise, which is also very interesting. This is also, we would have had an entire generation come through post-1980 where they weren't having prayer in schools, they weren't having religious symbolism in their classes, and they weren't having the Ten Commandments on the wall. So, it's all culminating really in 1998, and then like I said earlier, it just starts snowballing. Now, we also have the fact that today many participants of the Cultural Revolution are now professors or bureaucrats within the university system, and they're teaching the newest counterculture ideas like transgenderism, critical race theory, and Marxism, which I am fully aware that Marxism is not a new concept, but it is much, much, much more accepted than it was in the 1960s when the Cultural Revolution was happening because we were still in the Cold War at that time, and we had just gotten over the Red Scare. Now, Marxism is hardly even questioned today. Communism and socialism are on the rise, and nobody's really concerned about it in the grand scheme of things aside from many conservatives. Now, finally, we have immigration. I actually found this out while I was writing the script, which was extremely fascinating, and it also explains a lot about our change in American culture and the rise of DEI in our culture. So, in 1965, the Immigration and Naturalization Act was passed into law. So, what this did is it got rid of the immigration quota system that had been in place since the Immigration Act of 1924. This system established quotas for immigration, with high allowances for immigrants that were coming from Northern Europe and Western Europe, and lower quotas for people that were coming from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe. So, think about it like this. France, Ireland, England, all of the Dutch countries and the Netherlands and Norway, those people were having higher quotas of people coming in, people from Southern Europe. I don't know if Spain would classify because it is Southern, but it's also Western, but think about like any part of Europe that's really backing up and close to either the Middle East or China or just the entire continent of Asia. Those countries were less, had much lower quotas than the countries that were closer to like Russia and Greenland and England and places like that. So, what this new system allowed for was a 20,000 person cap from each country, and the way that they broke this up was 75% of immigrants from each country, 75% of visas that were issued were for reuniting families, 20% of visas issued from each country were going to skilled labor, and then 5% were going to refugees that were trying to escape from their country. So, with that what we saw was a huge, huge, dramatic increase of immigrants coming in from Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and those countries, those immigrants were bringing with them forms of third-worldism and religions that were incompatible with Christianity like Islam. So, then we have the Immigration Act of 1990, which this one is way more extreme in my opinion than the Immigration Act of 1965. The Immigration Act of 1965 was meant to get rid of any like bias or racism because it just wanted to make all the countries equal. Now, what 1990 did was it really just flooded America with people who had no clue what American culture was, and they had no reason to assimilate. Now, this one created temporary protected status. This new classification allowed individuals from other countries that were experiencing war, famine, natural disasters, and other national emergencies and problems to live in and sometimes work in the U.S. until their country was safe again. So, the idea was a country would break out in a civil war. We're going to use Somalia because Somalia has been in the news recently, and they actually just had their TPS status revoked. So, Somalians got their temporary protected status in 1991, and it just is going to end on March 17th of this year, 2026. So, Somalia, I believe they had a civil war. I believe they're actually still in a civil war, but 1991, they were in a really bad shape, and the federal government said, okay, you can come here until your culture country gets cleaned up. So, if you're only going somewhere to basically live and operate as a refugee, and in some cases, you don't even have the ability to work, why would you assimilate? Why would you try to engage with American culture and become part of the nation if you think you're only going to be here for a short-term amount of time? You're not going to teach your children the language. You yourself may not actually learn the language. You won't try to be a contributing member of society because you think you might only be here for, you know, at the time it was, I think they would have three years, and then they would re-evaluate it. So, you might think you're going to be here for a max of three years, but here, it looks like they were here for, what is that, 35 years? That's multiple new Somalis being born. That's like three decades, three generations of Somalis that are being produced in their time here, and they're not assimilating or becoming part of the culture or participating in society because they think at some point they'll come, they'll go home. And then we see fraud happen from the Somali community in Minnesota because they have no loyalty to the US. They're not adopting any, you know, form of Christian religion. They're staying with Islam, and it's just not compatible with American culture. So, we see huge shifts in our culture because we're bringing in huge groups of refugees and people with temporary protective status from third world countries that have no clue how to even assimilate, nor do they want to assimilate with American culture. So, today we see traditional conservatism clashing with this idea of counterculture on the national stage, and we see it, just think about the halftime show this weekend. That's the perfect example. At the same time in America, at, I believe it was like 8 15 p.m., we have Bad Bunny on the stage condoning hookup culture, LGBTQ ideology, third world cultures. Literally, he performed in front of like, they had a set of like a restaurant or a gas station or something saying we accept EBT, like utterly and completely not American culture, not pick yourself up by your bootstraps and get to work and make society better and assimilate, nothing like that. Also, if you want to try to find the lyrics translated, which I recommend for your knowledge, but not for your mental health, they are nothing but horrible, horrible language, horrible language, not good for families, not good for children to be watching, and they only got away with it because he was speaking in Spanish. If this had been in English, the entire thing would have bleeped out, been bleeped out, because it was so incredibly provocative, and compare that to the Turning Point USA halftime show, which placed Faith, Family, and Freedom at the center of their performance. We saw people honoring Charlie Kirk. We saw lyrics and songs that were suitable for children. We saw people that were loving Christians and that had a story about how they became Christians. They had a testimony, and they were up there just trying to play for the betterment of America, trying to bring back American culture, and a lot of people have come out and said, oh, I don't know why Kid Rock started with that first song. I honestly cannot pronounce that song if my life was on it, so I'm not even gonna try, but his first song that was very, it was extremely worldly, but the idea behind that was he played this worldly song, then it jumped to the classical music, and then it jumped to his rendition of Till You Can't by Cody Johnson with the added lyric about coming to Christ and dusting off your Bible and that Jesus is for everyone. It was a testimony in and of itself, the way that he performed it wasn't to be worldly and then to be hypocritical, it was to show that anybody can come to Christ regardless of who you are, where you've been, or what you've gone through. Very, very different than Bad Bunny and all of his twerking dancers and provocative language that would have been bleeped out if it was in English. Just look at Angel Studios creating content that actually caters to families and conservative Christian ideals rather than whatever filth is trending in Hollywood. We are starting to see people get fed up with this. We are starting to see people trying to have families, trying to raise their children and educate their children that are looking up at culture being like, I don't even know what to do. I don't want my children seeing this filth that's on TV. I don't want them being exposed to these ideas at such a young age and saying, Mommy, Daddy, what does this mean? We're seeing a shift in Christian conservatives that want to bring our culture back, but it's gonna take a lot of work to do it. It's gonna take young, gen Z Americans like myself and like many people watching this to get to work and start lobbying their legislations and lobbying their schools to start changing policies and bringing back American culture. So next week, we're gonna talk more about what you can do, but start thinking about things that would be easier, things that are upsetting to you now that you would like to see changed, and then when we come back next week, we'll really be talking about how to get your hands dirty and how to get involved to make these things happen to bring back American culture. We're not too far gone yet, but we're right at the precipice. We are not far away from there being a point of no return. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of The Reagan-Faulkner Show. Remember, if you want more content until our next episode, you can check us out at ReaganFaulkner.com and check us out on our socials at The Reagan Faulkner Show on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Remember to check us out at TheWilmingtonStandard.com and on the socials Facebook and Instagram at The Wilmington Standard. Thank y'all so much, and I can't wait to see you on the next one.