I was born into a world where certain things were simply assumed. Not argued. Not defended. Just assumed.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Christianity functioned as the moral backdrop of everyday life. Even for people who did not attend church regularly, there was a shared understanding of right and wrong, of authority, and of obligation. Stores were closed on Sundays. There were no competing activities pulling people away. Preachers, teachers, and doctors were generally trusted. Divorce was rare and carried real stigma. Sexual relationships were understood to belong within marriage. These expectations did not feel oppressive at the time; they felt normal. They were woven into the fabric of life.

I did not experience this as theology so much as atmosphere. Truth was assumed to be something outside ourselves. The Bible was treated as authoritative, even by many who rarely read it. Looking back, I can see that some people went through the motions for social reasons, but the structure still held. The culture itself reinforced it.

Martha and I graduated from the university in 1963, newly married and beginning adult life together. Almost immediately, we sensed that something was changing. The emerging hippie movement, the questioning of authority, and the fragmentation of shared moral standards were becoming visible. We watched the country divide into groups, each increasingly confident in its own judgments about right and wrong. Behaviors that once carried social consequences no longer did—at least within certain circles.

We watched Vietnam War protests unfold on television, framed not simply as political disagreement but as moral opposition. In 1967, I was in Newark, New Jersey, when riots broke out. I remember driving through downtown streets as buildings were in flames and unrest filled the city. That experience stayed with me. It felt as though a line had been crossed. Trust in institutions—police, government, leadership—was unraveling in real time.

By the late 1960s, protest gave way to celebration. Events like the Summer of Love and Woodstock did not merely resist authority; they replaced it. Experience, self-expression, and personal authenticity became guiding principles. During that same period, Christianity was steadily removed from public life through the elimination of Bible reading and school-sponsored prayer in schools. The world I had grown up in was receding, and something else was taking its place.

In 1970, we watched the Kent State shootings on television. Four students were killed. What struck me most was not only the tragedy itself, but what it revealed: authority no longer carried moral legitimacy simply by existing. Appeals to tradition, Scripture, or institutions increasingly failed—not because they had been carefully refuted, but because fewer people felt bound by them.

The Roe vs. Wade decision a few years later reinforced what was already underway. Moral authority continued to move inward. Truth became personal. Scripture became optional. As Martha and I conducted Bible studies during those years, it became clear that belief itself could no longer be assumed. What had once been shared was now contested—or ignored.

Years later, after twenty-four years in industry, I joined the faculty at Oklahoma Christian University. During the first faculty training session, I was asked to review Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. His argument—that relativism had become the only accepted virtue—resonated deeply. Moral certainty was now viewed with suspicion. Personal values replaced shared standards. Christianity was no longer a cultural foundation; it was increasingly countercultural.

Technology accelerated these changes. I brought one of the first personal computers onto campus in the mid-1980s and later pioneered seminars training engineers to design and optimize emerging cell phone systems. I watched, up close, as communication became constant and authority easier to bypass. When the internet reached roughly half the population around the year 2000, something crossed a threshold. Moral obligation became negotiable. Christianity was not merely ignored; it was displaced. Even among regular churchgoers, biblical literacy declined. Sundays filled with commerce. The day lost its distinctiveness.

By the time Martha and I retired in 2002, and especially in the decade that followed, the direction was unmistakable. Identity increasingly defined truth. Polarization deepened. Even the idea of self-evident truths began to disappear from public life.

Looking back, I now see that we have always lived within an assumed storyline—a framework that shapes how we understand meaning, truth, and purpose. Another name for that framework is a worldview. In my childhood, that worldview was broadly Christian. By the early 2000s, it had become secular, grounding authority not in God or revelation, but in human experience and personal choice.

So today, as a Christian, I often feel like a fish out of water. Not because I am angry, and not because I am confused, but because the moral center that once held our culture together has quietly shifted. And the strain is not only out there in the culture—it shows up between people. When we no longer share the same basic assumptions, even ordinary conversations can feel fragile.

That is why the next step is not simply comparing worldviews, but learning how to live faithfully among those differences—how to hold conviction without hardening, withdrawing, or losing relationship.