Lately I’ve been reading up on the Religious Right, particularly James Ault’s marvelously insightful new book Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church. I’m in the middle of writing a larger article on these themes (maybe next week), but right now I want to toss out a simple conclusion: Despite how it looks, when the conservative rank-and-file talk about moral values, they aren’t being hypocrites.
I know. I know. Rush Limbaugh had a drug problem. Bill O’Reilly settled rather than face those nasty charges about harassment and phone sex. Our freedom-loving White House can’t seem to grasp the idea that torture is wrong. You don’t have to remind me how much hypocrisy there is on the Right. But at the lower levels, conservatives worry about moral breakdown for a simple and absolutely genuine reason: Conservative morality is breaking down.
Ault’s book relates his study of a small church outside of Worcester, Massachusetts that he codenames Shawmut River Baptist. The church teaches its members and their children a just-say-no morality: God made the rules, and they’re not up for negotiation. You don’t need to know why, beyond knowing where the Bible says so. George Lakoff’s description of the Strict Father Family paradigm (in Moral Politics, another marvelously insightful book) rings true:
A traditional nuclear family, with the father having primary responsibility for supporting and protecting the family as well as the authority to set overall family policy. He teaches children right from wrong by setting strict rules for their behavior and enforcing them through punishment.
Lakoff contrasts this with the Nurturant Parent Family, which he presents as the model for liberal moral values:
The obedience of children comes out of their love and respect for their parents, not out of the fear of punishment. ... The questioning of parents by children is positive, since children need to learn why their parents do what they do
Ault describes Shawmut River Church as “villagelike.” The members are all involved in each other’s business and privacy is minimal. Church activities take up enormous amounts of time, which limits the members’ exposure to the mass media and friends outside the church.
But in spite of
this attempt at immersion, the moral conditioning of Shawmut River
doesn’t work. Divorce is rampant among the saved, and the
decisive moment of Spirit and Flesh comes when the minister’s
unmarried teen
daughter is discovered to be pregnant. In the
ensuing battle to oust the minister, true nastiness breaks out on all
sides.
Here’s the conclusion I draw from all this: The
just-say-no, rules-are-absolute model of morality used to work
reasonably well in real villages, where everyone believed
more-or-less the same thing and the rules were never seriously
questioned. But no matter how villagelike a church community
is today, members are inevitably going to come into contact with
people who do question the rules. And once the questioning
starts, people who have been trained not to question are in trouble,
because they have no answers. On the other hand, people who have been
trained since childhood to question the rules until they find answers
that satisfy them -- the liberal model -- are in much better shape.
The stats bear
this out. Right after the election, the media gave some play to the
fact that Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the nation.
(I’ve heard the following quip there about same-sex marriage:
“In Massachusetts we
like marriage so much we think
everybody should have a shot at it.”) What didn’t get
covered is how typical this is: If you pick at random a red state, a
blue state, and an index of moral decay -- drop-out rate, divorce,
teen pregnancy, murder, whatever -- odds are that the blue state is
significantly better off than the red state. [1]
Liberal morality is doing just fine, thank you.
But religious conservatives like the members of Shawmut River don’t realize that there is liberal morality, much less that it is in reasonably good shape. They know from personal experience how hard it is to stay moral in today’s society, and how hard it is to pass moral values on to the next generation. If they are the moral elite -- and their ministers and Fox News assure them that they are -- they can only imagine how bad things are in liberal families. And if they can’t imagine those dens of iniquity, their ministers and Fox News will tell them about it.
So they hear
those tales of conservative misconduct with different ears. Even
Rush Limbaugh is a drug addict. Even Bill O’Reilly
is coercing underlings into phone sex. Even Bill Bennett has a
gambling problem. What more evidence
do you need that the
temptations of Babylon are almost irresistible these days? What even
more sick and twisted things must Godless liberals be doing?
We won’t
pull those people away from conservatism by showing them more and
more examples of conservative misconduct. Whatever they hear about
conservatives will not surprise them; they already know morality is
breaking down. It will just convince them that liberals must be doing
even worse things.
Instead, we need to spread the good news
of liberal morality. We need to publicize how liberal sex education
is succeeding at limiting teen pregnancy where conservative
abstinence-training is failing. We need to publicize how
well
liberal marriages are doing -- so well that even homosexuals want to
get married. We need to talk about young people who carry on their
parents’ liberal values by fighting poverty and social
injustice -- causes that were also dear to the heart of a certain
Jewish carpenter.
Liberal morality is alive and well. That’s the message, and we should repeat it so often that they can’t help but hear it.
Doug Muder
February, 2005
back to Doug Muder’s Open Source Journalism project
[1] The
American Prospect has a nice summary at
http://www.prospect.org/webpage.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=8971
Divorce statistics
broken down by religion (conservative Baptists have the most, with
liberal Christians doing much better and agnostics and atheists best
of all) are at
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm
You can find the
complete list of my political/legal articles at
http://www.gurus.com/dougdeb/politics/politics.html
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