AMERICAN AMORALITY

American Amorality at Every Turn: The Collapse of a Nation’s Conscience

Something is rotting in America, not beneath the surface but right out in the open, in full view, infecting every institution, pulpit, boardroom, and political rally. America has abandoned morality. The decline isn’t subtle. It’s loud, proud, and accelerating toward the abyss.

We are a nation that once prided itself on having a moral compass, grounded in faith, duty, honor, truth, and justice. But today, that compass is spinning wildly, hijacked by greed, tribalism, and the cult of personality. The truth is painful, but it must be said: American public life has no working moral code.

Religion Has Betrayed Morality

Start with organized religion, the institutions once trusted to provide ethical guidance. Today’s churches have abandoned Christ's teachings in favor of tax-exempt political power. Christ preached humility, sacrifice, compassion, and care for the least among us. But modern religious leaders have traded the Sermon on the Mount for campaign speeches and real estate portfolios.

They worship profit, not the divine.
They preach division, not love.
And they have wrapped their sanctuaries in red hats instead of robes of righteousness.

If Jesus walked into one of these megachurches today, he’d flip the tables and call it what it is: a business dressed up as a belief system.

Business and the Professions: Ethics for Sale

Business, once guided by principles of professionalism and service, has become a raw contest of greed. Profit has always been the engine of capitalism, but once, there were brakes: codes of ethics, professional responsibilities, and fiduciary duties. Now? Those have been shredded.

• Lawyers advertise like snake oil salesmen.
• Doctors bill like corporate middlemen.
• Corporations pollute, exploit, and manipulate while slapping “social responsibility” slogans on their websites.

And Wall Street? It doesn’t just gamble with money. It gambles with people’s lives. Today's only guiding principle in American business is “What can I get away with?”

Politics: A Sewer with a Microphone

Then there is politics,  perhaps the most visible symbol of our moral collapse. We once argued about policies. Now we argue about truth itself. Politicians lie openly, shamelessly, repeatedly,  and suffer no consequence. They are rewarded for it.

And leading the descent is a man who embodies everything we were once taught to abhor:

• A convicted criminal,
• A serial adulterer,
• A pathological liar,
• A man accused by dozens of women,
• A business cheat,
• A con man,
• And a man who enabled a sex trafficking ring and may well have profited from it.

Donald J. Trump is not just amoral,  he is the final blow to any claim America had left to moral superiority. He didn’t just fall short of virtue — he crushed virtue, mocked it, and replaced it with a swaggering cult of personality built on cruelty, vengeance, and deceit.

And millions still worship him.

What does that say about us?

The Last Moral Holdouts

There may be only one institution left where morality, though imperfect, is still taught and honored: the military, especially the U.S. Marine Corps. It is not flawless, but it is one of the few places where values are drilled, lived, and enforced.

Courage. Honor. Duty. Integrity.

These are not buzzwords in the Corps. They are requirements. And while our political and religious leaders chase money and microphones, our service members, often poor and forgotten, quietly bear the burden of national defense with more moral clarity than the entire government combined.

But even the military cannot hold this crumbling edifice together alone.

Where Do We Go From Here?

It is not enough to complain. It is not enough to mourn the loss of morality. We must rebuild I, in ourselves, our communities, our leaders, and our institutions. We must call out hypocrisy wherever it lives,  especially when it drapes itself in a flag or a Bible.

Morality is not a slogan. It is not a brand. It is how we treat each other when no one is watching. And right now, too many Americans are failing that test.

The nation has gone insane, if not entirely immoral. But redemption is not impossible.

It begins with rejection:
Reject the lies.
Reject the corruption.
Reject the con men in pulpits and podiums.

And then it begins with a simple question:
What kind of country do we want to be,  and what are we willing to do to make it so?

Because if we do not restore morality, someone far worse than Trump will rise from his ashes,  and there will be nothing left to stop him.

William James Spriggs