The mood of America in the 1980s: some further observations on sociomoral issues

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 1994 by John H. Simpson

While any account of American politics in the 1980s must recognize the presence of the New Christian Right in the public arena, there is much controversy about the scope and extent of its impact and importance (Bruce 1988; Moen 1989; Wilcox 1992). This article explores one of the controversies about so-called "Moral Majority" politics, namely, a debate about the orientation of Americans to issues that were politicized by the New Christian Right (Simpson 1983, 1988; Sigelman and Presser 1988).

Directed as it is at the problem of measuring and representing attitudes toward sociomoral issues, the debate at first glance might appear to have a limited empirical focus. The controversy, however, has implications for understanding the relationships among any set of issues in a public arena. Thus, in addition to clarifying the extent of support for sociomoral issues, this article is intended to enlarge our understanding of the formal properties of issue arenas in those jurisdictions where citizens' attitudes and opinions are, in some sense, factored into political decisions and public choices.

THE DEBATE

Having analyzed a number of items from the General Social Survey of 1977 (Davis and Smith 1977; hereafter GSS1977), I reported (Simpson 1983) an estimate that 30 percent of Americans were positively oriented to the "Moral Majority platform" of sociomoral issues, 42 percent were Moral Majority "fellow travellers," and the remaining portion of the population (28 percent) was liberal on these issues. Sigelman and Presser (1988) took issue with that estimate, and the debate was joined in my reply (1988) to their critique. The issue remains alive in the literature today with, for example, Hadden (1993: 127) recently reporting the general tenor of my estimate, and Wilcox (1992:211-13) and Bruce (1993:634), following Sigelman and Presser, taking exception to it.

The debate involves three matters: (1) the choice of survey items, (2) cutting points for items, (3) the type of estimates that are made. Sigelman and Presser made a strong case that by choosing items that are oriented to policies and imposing strict cutting points that pit true "extremists" on the issues against the rest of the population, it is possible to show that only a very small proportion of Americans -- 5 percent in 1977 -- held views that could be interpreted as consistent with the positions of New Christian Right political actors. Sigelman and Presser's conclusion is based on the cross-classification of four items from GSS1977: (1) the extent to which abortion should be legal under any or only certain circumstances (ABLEGAL), (2) whether a respondent is for or against sex education in the schools (SEXEDUC), (3) attitudes toward the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), (4) approval or disapproval of the United States Supreme Court's ruling on prayer in the schools (PRAYER).

In my reply to Sigelman and Presser, I accepted their findings and interpretation regarding the orientation of Americans to the implications of Moral Majority politics for specific policy outcomes as measured by the items indicated above. However, I also noted that my estimates, unlike theirs, were not point estimates and, furthermore, that my estimates did not represent an attempt to gauge orientations to policy matters. They were, rather, an attempt to gain a sense of the American population's orientation to certain diffuse images and feelings that had penetrated the American political arena and were being manipulated in pursuit of a politics of sociomoral issues. Among other things, those feelings and images had reference points in the countercultural life-style of the 1960s, the rise of feminism, Watergate, the outcome of the Vietnam War, and the Iran hostage incident, which indicated for some that the perceived strength of America as a nation was on the wane. As Wuthnow (1983) has pointed out, there was a blurring of the boundaries between personal morality and politics in America in the late 1970s, a blurring that made a politics of sociomoral issues possible. Those politics, for some, proceeded on the premise that the nation's stature and strength would be restored if traditional moral standards and practices were undergirded. Thus, I examined attitudes toward: (1) abortion on demand (ABANY), (2) homosexual relations between consenting adults (HOMOSEX), (3) the patriarchal breadwinner/homemaker gendered division of labor (FEFAM), (4) the ruling on school prayer (PRAYER). With the exception of PRAYER, the items examined by Sigelman and Presser and those examined by me were considerably different, and we reached different conclusions.

My estimates differed in part from those of Sigelman and Presser due to the choice of different items. They also differed because I established cutting points for items that were intended to dichotomize respondents into two camps: those whose attitudes were consistent in a broad sense with the positions of the New Christian Right (but not, necessarily, "extremist") and those who fell outside that camp. In that regard it is important to keep in mind that when respondents were surveyed by NORC in 1977 they were not filtered for orientation to the New Christian Right. Indeed, that would have been a bit off-base in 1977. Respondents were, in other words, indicating their attitudes toward items that may not at the time have been directly connected in their minds to public and political arenas. Nevertheless, those attitudes were in a broad sense either consistent or inconsistent with what eventually came to be known as "Moral Majority politics." As such, they were potential resources for a politics of morality.