Moral collapse?

Christian Century, March 10, 1999

Conservative Christian political operative Paul Weyrich has bitterly complained that President Clinton's acquittal on impeachment charges of perjury and obstruction of justice symbolizes a collapse of American culture and morality. And he is not alone in that sentiment. The conclusion of the Senate trial has forced some conservative Christians to question whether they are in the moral majority and wonder if they'd be better off retreating from the political arena.

"Politics itself has failed," Weyrich wrote in a letter posted on the Web site of his Free Congress Foundation. "And polities has failed because of the collapse of the culture. The culture we are living in becomes an ever-wider sewer." Cultural collapse was also on the mind of Representative Henry Hyde (R., Ill.), Clinton's white-maned accuser, as he dosed the House managers' ease against the president: "I wonder if after this culture war is over ... an America will survive that's worth fighting to defend."

Throughout the spectacle of Clinton's impeachment, conservative Republicans sounded dire warnings about the end of the traditional way of life, a continued culture war and the collapse of morality. Their rhetoric painted a picture of a two-dimensional struggle between those who follow the strict, God-fearing moral code they champion and those who don't--the latter usually portrayed as a bunch of godless and amoral hedonists, with Clinton serving as Exhibit A.

Wrong, say at least two academies who study American culture and moral values: Don Beck, director of the National Values Center of Denton, Texas, and Paul H. Ray, a San Francisco anthropologist who heads American LIVES Inc., a market research and opinion polling firm that specializes in studying the effects of moral values on consumer choices. Although they disagree on some fine points, both men argue that a new set of cultural values is beginning to emerge, challenging the two-dimensional mind-set of Christian conservatives.

Ray, for example, offers a contrarian argument to Hyde and Weyrich. He sees the emergence of a third world of meaning and values, a rising cultural dimension that appeals to nearly one-fourth of American adults, or about 45 million people. Ray's term for them is the Cultural Creatives. They don't adhere to the traditional values of what Ray calls Heartlanders, who represent about 29 percent of America, or about 56 million adults. Nor are they the rational, materialistic and ultrapragmatic Moderns, a cultural wave that arose in the 1920s and now makes up 47 percent of America, or about 88 million adults.

According to Ray, Cultural Creatives are people with a strong spiritual and moral core, but one based on the social movements that have emerged in the past 30 years, from the civil rights movement to feminism to the environmental movement, instead of the God and country of the Heartlanders or the science and Dow Jones of the Moderns.

Six out often Cultural Creatives are women; many live on the West Coast; more of them are college-educated than Heartlanders or Moderns; most are in the upper-middle class. They are strongly focused on the environment and the rebuilding of neighborhoods and communities; they love foreigners and the exotic; they are concerned about violence toward women and children and the development of caring relationships; they are forging a new "sense of the

sacred" that combines personal growth, service to others and spirituality; they have a social conscience and a guarded optimism about society's prospects.

Don't dismiss them as wind-chime-loving New Agers, said Ray. Stitched together, these Cultural Creatives form a force that stands alongside the Heartlanders and the Moderns, flying a new set of moral standards. Rather than a collapse of morality, Ray sees the rise of multiple sets of values, each with a strong moral component. "What I contend, exactly contrary to Hyde and Weyrich, is that our moral standards are going up," said Ray, who studied at both Yale University and the University of Michigan. "Americans are getting more moral, not less.... What we're seeing is that Americans are rising up and educating themselves and adding to their moral repertoire."

And in Ray's opinion that's a threat to Heartlanders like Hyde and Weyrich, who tend to tout their moral views in what academics like to call "triumphalist" tones--an insistence that their cultural values are superior to any others, the truest representation of American culture. In their long battle to dominate the Republican Party, conservative Christians have insisted on moral absolutes, the black-and-white of right and wrong; they have hissed at the gray-toned moral relativism of a favorite bete noire, "secular humanists," and the if-it-feels-good-do-it credo of the '60s counterculture.

"We're talking about moral pluralism here, not moral relativism," said Ray. "We have more moral values rattling around than at any other time in our history. People who want to hold on to the old, narrow ways are going to hate that."