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Declining moral values leading to rising suicides in US: Pastor

Friday, 22 April 2016 5:28 PM [ Last Update: Friday, 22 April 2016 5:26 PM ]

There has been a profound shift towards secularism, humanism and materialism in the US and Western societies, even in the Christian and Jewish religious institutions, Mark Dankof told Press TV on Friday.

The alarming rise of the suicide rate in the United States is mostly the consequence of declining religious values and increasing sexual immorality in the American society, a preacher and former US Senate candidate says.

The results of a New York Times poll in 2012 revealed a “decline in traditional religious beliefs and traditional sexual morality in this country that reflects a revolutionary sea change from my parents and grandparents generation,” said Mark Dankof, who is also a broadcaster and pastor in San Antonio, Texas.

There has been a profound shift towards secularism, humanism and materialism in the US and Western societies, even in the Christian and Jewish religious institutions, Dankof told Press TV on Friday.

“This produces a sense of increasing hopelessness and meaningless among people,” he added. “People are very, very fearful of many, many things; they’re looking in all of the wrong places for solutions to their problems.”

“In the Western world, there seems to be a militant opposition to religion, to morality and an increasing reliance upon those things that can never satisfy the soul,” Dankof said. “Money, sexual perversion, political power; these things do not satisfy, these things do not provide meaning.”

The US suicide rate has increased at an alarming pace during the past 15 years, largely due to mental illness, drug abuse and the economic recession, according to a new report by the US government.

Suicide rates in the United States jumped 24 percent in the years between 1999 and 2014, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a report released on Friday.

The rise was particularly steep for white women and Native Americans, the data analysis found.

The suicide rate increased 45 percent among females and 16 percent among males, narrowing the gap between the two genders.

Native Americans had the sharpest rise of all racial and ethnic groups, with rates rising by 89 percent for women and 38 percent for men.

The increases were so widespread that they lifted the nation’s suicide rate to 13 per 100,000 people, the highest since 1986.

"The findings in this report are extremely concerning," said Nadine Kaslow, a researcher at Emory University in Atlanta and past president of the American Psychological Association.

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