Ian Boyne, Contributor

Once a year, we can expect the country's elite to turn up for prayer and a sermon, and that is at the National Prayer Breakfast. But Jamaica's most powerful and influential men and women don't really put as much store in their own lives and thinking on religious values.

Our elite is highly secularised, and even when prominent members of the society attend church, their values are still heavily influenced by the Western materialistic ethos. There is a values crisis in Jamaica, and that is at the heart of many of our most severe problems. The Church has been a dismal failure in this country in terms of articulating an intellectual vision and a philosophy which sharply challenges secular humanism.

The Church has many intellectually competent persons, but they have rarely engaged the public square, retreating into their little intellectual ghettoes where they preach to the converted, often in incomprehensible rhetoric, or speak among themselves in a kind of intellectual masturbation. Once in a while a group of them issues a statement on public affairs, which this newspaper carries.

But mostly they are silent, while the secularists dominate the media and set the agenda. The Church, of course, has a big 'to do' annually at the National Prayer Breakfast, and they usually bring out their more eloquent to speak. But after that New Year's ritual, it's back to business as usual - recoiling into their cocoon, 'holding their corner' among their brethren and blinding themselves with their own light, while darkness engulfs the land.

Crisis

Jamaica suffers not only from a crisis of political and private sector leadership, but from a crisis in religious leadership. Often, the churchmen who are eager to speak have little of substance to say, and those who do engage in self-gagging. A crisis, indeed.

The Charismatic-Pentecostal 'Health and Wealth' wing of the Church, now the fastest growing outside of the Seventh-day Adventists, is captive to the hedonistic self-absorption characteristic of Western bourgeois society. The preaching focuses on the self and what one gets is little more than pop psychology. The Joel Osteen, Creflow Dollar, Joyce Meyer, Henry Fernandez, Kenneth Copeland type of Christianity is one which focuses on material blessings and prosperity, and which fails to give a holistic picture of biblical Christianity.

So, while the society is crying out for a to the empty secularist Gospel which is being offered, popular Christianity in Jamaica is largely intellectually anaemic, and people in the established churches who could provide the intellectual critique of our distorted values are muted and in self-imposed isolation.

Yet, our secular elite cannot provide the moral vision and ethical philosophy which this country needs. This is why commentators in the media will devote much time to the issues of the day - whether they be what is dubbed the 'Cuban Light Bulb Scandal', the 'Trafigura Scandal', the standoff between the political, the Crash Plus (oops! Cash Plus) crisis; corruption in the police force, high crime, our educational underachievement and high incidence of rape and carnal abuse - outside of a broader context.

The fact, is Jamaica is suffering from a philosophical crisis, a crisis of values, a crisis of ideology - or the lack of it. Carl Stone identified the problem shortly before he died, in the last major paper he wrote. He said the dominance of money as the single currency of influence signalled a values crisis. He noted that the old order of values had been displaced without anything to replace it. Don Robotham was to follow with his 1998 Grace Kennedy Foundation lecture.

Materialistic values

If we had a society in which money and materialistic values were not as overriding, you would not have the level of corruption that you have in the police force today. The reason many people are afraid to give information to the police to lock away dangerous criminals is because they fear that the police will pass on their names and whereabouts to those same criminals.

If we had more police personnel who were content with what little they have, instead of wanting to get rich overnight, you would have less crime.

If this one institution alone were less corrupt and paid more attention to ethics, the country would be different. Of course, I don't hold the view that the police represent the source of our problems with crime. They are contributors but they are part of a whole ethos which feeds the high crime.

The fact of the matter is that too many Jamaicans are motivated by money over morality. And this comment has nothing to do with people 'not wanting to see poor people strive'.

It has nothing to do with 'the hypocrisy of middle-class people' like me, who live well while decrying the materialism of the trying man. Think about this rationally: Do you believe it is OK for mothers to encourage their 13-year-old daughters to sleep with 50-year-old men just to get money to send them to school and to buy school books (which is important)?

Do you believe it is OK for the poor man to put up his stall anywhere he feels like, or to keep a dance all night beside your house just because he is a 'sufferer' and must 'eat a food'? Do 'sufferers' have the right to capture land from you because you happen not to be using that land at this time? So why should you have land lying idle while the poor man and his children are on the streets? No, even you who love the sufferer know that some ethical principles have to guide human action, no matter how poor the person is.

Not need, but greed

Would you say prostitution is OK if its proceeds do some good, like sending children to school and buying medicine for grand-mothers? What drives the corruption which you detest? Often, it is not need, but greed. The people who have ripped off taxpayers and who have abused public funds to enrich themselves and their friends are not sufferers. But they are motivated more by money, not morality.

But we are not a society which values morality highly outside of rhetoric. When it comes to rhetoric, we all say the right things. We talk a beautiful talk. We give great speeches on political platforms and in public fora have live broadcasts.

We are all for proper values and ethics. We all deplore the decline in morals among our people, particularly the young. But this does not prevent our 'family newspapers' from publishing pornographic material in their centre pages, or from advertising whorehouses euphemistically designated as 'sensuous massage parlours'. It does not prevent some of our most prestigious brand-name companies from sponsoring dancehall events in which the police force is verbally abused and people invited to 'kill Babylon'; and where criminal dons are openly lionised and where lyrics glorify the murder of citizens. It does not prevent them from signing marketing deals dancehall artistes who promote violence.

Morality

Yet, these same big companies will give money to Crime Stop, support their private sector umbrella groups to issue strong statements condemning violence and will give after-dinner speeches calling for more law and order in the society. What hypocrisy! Because we don't really take morality seriously. What we are really interested in is material advancement despite our politically correct rhetoric.

We want to sell newspapers and our products and we want our media houses to be on top so we will carry programmes which militate against uplifting values. It's all about the Almighty Dollar.

Poverty and material deprivation, we know, breed crime. We must deal with this monster of poverty and unemployment if we want to tame crime. Preaching alone cannot do it, nor can any values and attitude programme.

But let's consider this: The vast majority of poor people are not engaged in criminal activities. Many are decent and law-abiding. Many take the daily grind of poverty rather than bow to corruption and 'bandooloo'. Why?

It is certainly not because of what they have in their stomachs. It is what they have in their heads. It is their beliefs, their ideology, their thinking - their values which make them resist crime and antisocial behaviour.

So, while we are striving to eliminate crime, perhaps if we try to affect people's value system we can make some contribution to building law and order in the society.

If we build a more ethical Jamaica, a Jamaica where its citizens put the interests of others above personal interests, then the impact would be far-reaching. It means that a political party would not merely be thinking about its narrow power interests, but would look towards the good of the society.

Burial of our dream

An opposition party would cooperate with the government and even help the government to succeed, if it is truly committed to people's welfare and knows that a government's success means the betterment of people. Naive, you say - certainly, according to the present rules of engagement. Absurd, according to the game of power politics which is being played.

Why have any Vale Royal talks to take off pressure from the Government? Nonsense, say the tribalists and 'realists'.

A government would think of not disenfranchising and victimising people simply because their party is out of power but would empower them, if ethics trumped opportunism. Its members hold to the primacy of people over party politics. A government would think of facilitating the opposition, even when that might risk its own narrow interests. But perhaps I am only dreaming.

Perhaps. Then I suggest that we stick with the present reality of high murder rate, high rape, high carnal abuse, corruption, boorish behaviour, high unemployment and the burial of our dream of sustainable development.

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may be reached at ianboyne1@yahoo.com