According to biblical worldview experts at Family Research Council, fare evasion in public transportation is one clear symptom of the lack of biblical worldview in our culture today.

Toward the end of August, The New York Times’s David Leonhardt analyzed the rise of fare evasion and “why people are ignoring public transit’s most basic rule.” He wrote about his experiences in both New York City and Washington, D.C. “I’ve been riding the subway regularly for almost 40 years,” he noted. “When I started doing so, in the 1980s, fare evasion was common.” Around the 1990s, “the subway system became a cleaner and safer place.” And yet, he continued, “For the past few years, fare beating has again become a regular part of public transit. I’ve watched people do it just a few feet away from powerless transit workers looking directly at them.”

In the final analysis, Leonhardt and his colleague found, “On nearly half of all bus rides in the city, people now skip paying the fare. As a result, about one million riders ignore the bus system’s most basic rule every weekday.” The question, then, is why? What factors led to this consistent disregard of the law, and what does it reveal about society? David Closson, FRC’s director of the Center for Biblical Worldview, and Joseph Backholm, senior fellow of that same department, tackled these questions together on Friday’s episode of “Washington Watch.”

“[T]his is obviously a serious criminal and fiscal concern for these cash-strapped big city transportation systems,” Backholm stated. But “what does it mean, culturally, that millions of people are willing to essentially steal? … And what does it mean for the future of our cities, of our country, and ultimately, of our civilization?” According to Closson, these are questions that can be analyzed from “multiple perspectives.”

“Just the sheer scale of this” is worth highlighting, Closson emphasized. Financially, if there are roughly “one million people a day who are not paying to ride the bus in New York City, that’s about 47.8% of the folks who ride the bus daily.” This costs “the Transportation Authority $315 million for the year.” Similar staggering numbers are true of those who evade paying on the subway. Ultimately, Closson noted that a $2.90 fare is “not breaking the bank” for many city dwellers. Yet, it points to the larger theme of how laws are not being enforced as they should be.

Backholm pointed out that for many elected officials, it seems crimes such as “petty theft” are treated as a crime not “worth prosecuting” or “enforcing.” The problem with this, Closson added, is that “our law is inherently pedagogical.” They communicate “to people what is right, what is wrong, what is righteous, what is unrighteous.” Regarding large cities, “We’ve seen this over several years, increasingly,” that despite “rules in place” and “laws on the books, they aren’t being enforced. “[W]hat does that communicate to people?” Closson asked. “It communicates to people [that] this isn’t that big of a deal.” It welcomes the mindset of believing that cheating one’s way out of paying $2 “can’t really impact someone’s life.”

However, Closson urged, “especially as Christians, we want to take … every thought captive to the Lord Jesus.” The rise in fare evasions “speaks to a Christian principle of order,” and “order is an intrinsic part of a Christian worldview.” According to Closson, what it comes down to is as we increasingly “get away from that basic worldview that has been so much a part of Western civilization, you go from order to disorder. And eventually, you go from disorder to anarchy.” All this speaks “to where we are moving as a culture — where there’s just a flagrant disregard for the rule of law and … the basic principle of order in a respect for the authority.”

Backholm concurred, “[I]t does have to do with order” — specifically, he clarified, the “fundamental” kind of order that deals with integrity. “It’s the belief that it’s a respect of other people’s property. And it’s this idea that [we] will do the right thing even if no one makes [us].” He continued to address the fact that evading bus fares is not something Americans around the world likely pay much attention to. However, what has become increasingly visible, and what many Americans have noticed, is “the erosion of social trust in America.”

For instance, he explained, most city drugstores have a majority of their products locked up in cases to prevent theft. But it “hasn’t always been that way,” Backholm stated, “because there [once] was this general ability to trust the public that though they had access to items on the shelf, they wouldn’t just take them and steal them without paying for them” under the premise that stealing is wrong. But now, “that ability to trust our neighbor has clearly eroded,” which begs the question: If this persists, “What does that mean for us moving forward?”

Closson reiterated that there may be many factors impacting whether authorities choose to prosecute. But what he found more important was to speak to how believers should behave. “[I]t’s important for us as Christians to actually affirm the rule of law,” he contended. Closson pointed to Romans 13, widely known as the “key text for how we think about the purpose and the nature of government,” which is “to promote good and to punish evildoers.” But when government fails to carry that out, “when it stops promoting the good” and “going after evildoers, … you lose deterrence, and there’s actually no incentive to pursue virtue.” Ultimately, he insisted, “a big part of this conversation has to do with the fact that a lot of the people in charge are not doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”

There’s a “connection between virtue, freedom, and religion,” Backholm said — specifically regarding “the idea … that you cannot be free without virtue.” Why is this the case? “Because if people cannot control themselves … they must be controlled by someone else,” which is “always the government.”

So, he continued, “[I]f you want civil freedom” and “the right to make your own decisions, you have to be trusted … to make good decisions.” And a biblical worldview helps us understand that “you can’t be virtuous unless you have religion,” which also then requires freedom. It equates to a “kind of cycle.” And historically, Backholm pointed out, “Americans have been the beneficiaries of generally virtuous societies for a long time.” But it’s making its way to being more of a “low trust society,” which starts with even the “small” decision to skip the metro fare.

As such, the reality is that “it’s suicidal in so many ways to just pretend that these small things aren’t big things in large part,” Backholm argued. But we make this mistake “because we don’t really have a sense of how much worse it can be when a society is just not virtuous,” he added.

Referring to research conducted by FRC’s Senior Fellow George Barna, Closson highlighted how “about 4% of Americans have what you would … call a consistent biblical worldview.” Relating this statistic to a “low trust society,” the correlation becomes clear. Essentially, the stronger the decrease of biblical worldview in society, the stronger the increase of distrust. “[T]he trajectory is not encouraging,” he emphasized.

Backholm asked, “[H]ow do we fix this?” Closson believes it’s first a matter of returning to the word of God. “That’s one of the reasons we have a daily Bible reading plan [at FRC]. It’s one of the reasons the Center for Biblical Worldview exists. Because if you take God out of the equation, if you take biblical Christianity out of the equation,” there’s no “solution that we can do in our own strength [or] our own power.” He insisted, “We need revival … to turn this thing around.” Backholm agreed, “That’s exactly right.”

Joseph concluded, “If we want to be free … we must be virtuous. And we cannot be virtuous on our own. That’s what the power of the Holy Spirit does in redeeming our hearts.” Yet at the same time, “We want cultural pressure for people to do the right thing, not cultural pressure for them to do the wrong thing. So, if that’s possible to create, we want to” strive in that direction.