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When I was at the Templeton Foundation, I was responsible for producing something called the Templeton Report, a fortnightly digest of research the Foundation had supported, and news about its grantees and associates. The new one came out yesterday. The lead item is about Templeton-funded social-science research undertaken by an academic team in the UK a few years ago, in which researchers surveying the worldviews of Britain’s urban underclass found that white and black youth were radically alienated from civic values and attachments to traditions, institutions, and places. Their Muslim peers in the inner city, by contrast, were not. Turns out that when rioting came to England this past summer, it heavily involved those inner city blacks and whites — but not inner city Muslims.

In an interview I did last month with James Arthur, the lead researcher and dean of the education school at the University of Birmingham (UK), Prof. Arthur explained what his team’s findings had to do with the roots of the rioters’ rage. Said Arthur:

Within Hodge Hill and elsewhere, the Muslim community was much clearer about the meaning and usage of the virtues. They understood virtue. They understood the significance of duty and responsibility. Partly it’s because of their religion. These people were poorer than the white children in economic terms and the Muslim children live in larger families. But what they have is family stability. They also have religion to back them up. They have clear family values. They have a code of honor and a morality that recognizes all the virtues that we were looking at in Hodge Hill. They could recognize these virtues more readily because of the way they were brought up and because their religion brought them up in the discourse of these values.

That wasn’t the case with black children and white children in my study. Many of the children who rioted already had much in the way of basic material goods. But if you look at their families, their families were much more likely to be in some way dysfunctional. Many of them are in single-parent families. A number of them are also in families where a number of children have been born to different fathers, and their mothers are often dependent on the state for benefits. The economy has been extremely unkind to many of the families of these children in recent years.

I think English society has recognized that there is something really rotten at the heart of all of this. Young people have had the void inside them filled with consumerism and a desire for celebrity. Teachers have sought to construct a rationale for moral education without subscribing to any particular set of values — parents have done the same. It seems they find identifying with any set of values to be deeply problematic in a pluralist society. It seems we have entered a new moral Dark Age. The secularization process, and the loss of transcendent values that comes with it, is rampant in the UK, even in some parts of America. There is also a collapse of authority, and a collapse of the recognition of authority. Many of our young people have little in the way of a stake in society — they have few public amenities to stimulate them in the form of public libraries, community centers, youth clubs, or sporting facilities. I fear that most of America is only 20 to 30 years behind us. And I don’t believe we’ve seen the end of this. These young people have done it once, and I think they’ll do it again.