Portable politics and durable religion: the moral worldviews of American evangelical missionaries

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2007 by James K. Wellman, Jr., Matthew Keyes

Proposition 2. Social groups often share similar moral worldviews, but individual moral worldviews always exhibit differentiation. Differentiation of moral beliefs between individuals in a social group will increase as one moves away from the core of the world-view to layers that are perceived as more negotiable and less necessary.

Like onions in a field, the moral worldviews of our respondents are similar enough for us to categorize them all as a particular type of onion, but each individual specimen exhibits unique variations according to the soil it was planted in and ways in which it was nurtured. Moreover, unlike onions, preferences and tastes also account for differentiation. We divide the layers of our evangelical respondents' moral worldviews into four analytic strata. (4)

At the center of our respondents' moral worldviews is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, based on an act of submission to the authority of their "Lord." This act of allegiance is intimate and intensely subjective. It is intimate in that this submission is not merely intellectual, but is an emotional commitment that is cultivated endlessly through worship, prayer, ritual, and personal piety. It is subjective in that it centers on a personal decision by each individual that engages the core identity of the self. The intimacy and subjective nature of this core are not only continuously nurtured, but normatively constructed. Leadership molds how these personal decisions should be made and how one should feel about them in the process. Indeed, the transformation of this personal core is central to what many pastors mentioned as an "authentic" faith. Moreover, this "new self" is the necessary engine of social change. Thus, the transformed self is not only the font of religious salvation, but of cultural and political change as well (Carpenter and Shenk 1990).

From this personal center arises a second layer of values respondents considered "moral." This second layer focuses on honesty, integrity, service, traditional sexual morality, devotion to family, and hard work. Respondents emphasized that "relationships"--starting with their relationship with Christ, but extending to friends, family, and strangers--play a central role in this morality. We do not claim that the values drawn by the evangelical community from this center are inherent to Christianity or the teachings of the Bible--they are interpretive acts. For instance, contemporary American "family values" were not a part of the original Christian community or the medieval church, nor do they play the same role in contemporary liberal Protestant congregations (Browning 2000). For evangelicals, this second moral layer calls for conservative and traditional values around heterosexual marriage over against what many evangelicals believe is the political imposition of gay marriage by elite liberal culture. Central among these moral values is a rejection of abortion, which respondents considered a "tragedy," an "abomination," a "holocaust," and a "terrible act against the sanctity of life." These moral values were consistent across our interviews. Respondents considered them "absolute" and "unconditional." Similarly, nearly half of the 298 stateside evangelical participants in the larger study made explicit mention of these as "absolute truths" over against the relative opinions of liberal culture and liberal Christianity (Wellman 2008). Finally, all of the missionaries, like our other evangelical respondents, based these moral values on biblical standards that they considered "absolute" and "certain."