Crime rates are not low

Headlines across the country tell of falling crime rates in American cities last year. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports “a reduction in every major crime category in 2024” in Atlanta. In Detroit, the Free Press announces that “leaders and police tout drop in violent crime statistics in 2024.” The PBS NewsHour tells viewers of a “sharp decline in murders and other crimes in 2024.”

These stories bring to mind the fundamentalist-modernist dispute of the early 20th century—which may seem odd at first, but it isn’t. For behind this crime story stands a deeper story, one not as comforting as the headlines suggest.

The reports about falling crime, while good news, are less than meets the eye for two reasons. First, they mostly represent a mere return to the normal rates of violent crime before a spike following the George Floyd controversy. Second, and more important, those “normal” rates of violent crime should be alarming instead of reassuring. The rates of violent crime that garner positive headlines today would have been shockingly high during the 1950s, an era that is well within the lifetimes of older Americans.

Every time period has its blind spots and problems, and the 1950s were no different. (Jim Crow comes quickly to mind.) But one way in which the 1950s were better than the 2020s is that Americans didn’t shoot, stab, rape, and rob each other nearly as much.

The numbers are stark: The rate of violent crime in the United States more than quadrupled over 30 years. It went from 160.9 per 100,000 people in 1960 to 731.8 in 1990. Then it started to fall as mass incarceration and police reforms (such as “broken windows policing”) took effect. An aging population also probably brought down crime rates, since young men commit most violent crimes. But even when the rate of violent crime fell to 379.4 per 100,000 people in 2019, it was still well more than double the level it was in 1960.

Something clearly went terribly wrong in America during the 1960s and ’70s, and—despite the rosy headlines—we haven’t recovered.

What happened? A big part of the answer has to be the sexual revolution and the decline of the two-parent family. The rate of births to unmarried women went from about 5% in 1960 to around 40% now. In his book Get Married, sociologist Brad Wilcox cites data showing that children from non-intact families are significantly more likely to have problems in school and to become victims of child abuse. They are also much more likely to go to prison, even when controlling for such factors as family income and race.

But what caused the decline of the two-parent family itself? Was it something new in the culture? Probably, in part, as welfare programs took the place of fathers as providers. But, also, something was missing. “We should not ask, ‘What is wrong with the world?’ for that diagnosis has already been given,” wrote British theologian John Stott. “Rather we should ask, ‘What has happened to salt and light?’”

That’s where the fundamentalist-modernist controversy comes in. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, theological modernists began taking over American seminaries and pulpits. As J. Gresham Machen pointed out, they called themselves Christians but preached a different religion from Christianity, one that taught the goodness of man and rejected Christ’s messianic claims, His miracles, and any need for atonement. The modernists, for the most part, won the dispute and took over entire denominations.

When churches stop preaching about sin and repentance, bad things happen—mainly the worship of God suffers and eternal souls go unsaved. But another problem is that sin gains an easier foothold in society as it faces fewer challenges. The process will look different in different communities with different levels of common grace, but it will never look good. In America, decades of liberal preaching softened up society for the sexual revolution.

Today, the theological descendants of the modernists celebrate each new frontier of the sexual revolution and each attempt to redefine the family despite the documented harms to children and society. Untethered from the Bible, the liberal churches have become active agents of decay instead of preserving salt.

So when you see news reports about last year’s “low” crime rates, remember the fundamentalist-modernist dispute—and how much lower the crime rate has been in the past and could be today if Christians would produce more salt and light.