Why 'Moral Values' Really Does Mean Faith-Based and Hot-Button Issues
By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
With a recent Pew survey showing that "moral values" have tumbled as a voter priority since the 2004 elections, the progressive group Faith in Public Life is taking me and E.J. Dionne to task for concluding that issues like abortion and gay marriage aren't as important to voters as they were four years ago.
As Faith in Public Life—the organization leading the charge in presenting an alternative religious voice in politics to the religious right—sees it, issues like abortion and gay marriage were never as important as religious conservatives and the news media claimed.
In fact, says Faith in Public Life, the 2004 exit poll question on "moral values" was basically meaningless:
When "moral values" first reared its ugly head in the 2004 exit polls, it caused a media sensation. The conventional wisdom went something like this: Opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage are the only "values" issues and the only "moral" party was the GOP. The poll question was thoroughly debunked soon after the election but it was too late—the misleading narrative had already been set.
Since then, several organizations (including this one) have cropped up to (among other things) help undo the damage of that question, lifting up example after example of a broader "moral agenda" and showing that no party "owns" voters of faith. It's an uphill battle. During the 2008 presidential primaries, the exit polls consistently asked more comprehensive religion questions of Republicans than Democrats, reinforcing the narrative that Republicans "own" religion. Even after the 2008 election, when Democrats increased their share of the religious vote substantially and people of faith demonstrated greater political independence, issue analysis is still haunted by the ghost of that ridiculous question.
Dionne's and Gilgoff's pieces use the poll data in different ways, but both operate under the assumption that "moral values" appear to have taken a back seat in the midst of economic turmoil, when voters are focused on issues like jobs and health care.
And therein lies the biggest flaw with the "moral values" question. It assumes that certain (unnamed but clearly implied) issues are not just shaped by values, but are values and all others are amoral.
Whenever I hear this argument—that voters think of "moral values" as a whole lot more than hot-button issues and that it encompasses progressive causes like economic justice and access to healthcare—I point to this follow-up survey to the 2004 exit polls conducted by Pew.
Rather than debunk the salience of moral values in the '04 election, the Pew poll confirmed it. From a fixed list of options, more voters selected "moral values" in Pew's poll than any other single issue, including Iraq or economy/jobs.
And as opposed to finding that the term "moral values" is largely meaningless, the 2004 Pew poll showed that people had clear notions of what the term meant. Check out this graph from the poll:
For those who thought "moral values" were the most important issue in 2004, more than 4 in 10 defined them as hot-button issues: abortion, gay marriage, or stem cell research.
An additional 18 percent defined moral values by explicitly mentioning religion. And 17 percent more defined the term as "traditional values," including "family values." A quarter of respondents, meanwhile, talked about the moral values in terms of candidate qualities.
Only 2 percent of respondents said that moral values "means nothing" or didn't know what it meant.
The Pew poll also found a huge gap between Bush and Kerry voters on the "moral values" question. Forty-four percent of Bush voters said moral values were their top priority, more than cited any other issue. Only 7 percent of Kerry voters, meanwhile, said moral values were their top concern.
If Faith in Public Life wants to argue that the GOP doesn't have a lock on "moral values," that's fine. But to argue that the 2004 moral values exit poll question is basically meaningless and that it has been wildly misinterpreted by the press just doesn't square with the data.
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Reader Comments
Curious
I find it curious that domestic terrorisim seemed to have abated when the nuts thought they'd have a chance to control the country through the Republican Party. Now that they know that is hopeless they are back to killing decent people to make some sort of twisted point.
I do not think the demise of radical Republicanism and violence by the right wing radicals are merely coincidental.
Half-assed reading of the Bible Exposed
RTS (WA)clearly neglected to read the Jewish prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, et. al. Economic justice is not primarily a matter of private/individual charity. The prophets spoke God's condemnation of the political leaders, the religious leaders, and the wealthy citizens of their states. They failed to honor the Deuteronomic requirement to treat land not as a matter of private ownership but as a matter of a crucial resource that was to be equally distributed to families as an ongoing matter of stewardship. That was to be reinvoked every Jubilee year by guaranteeing the property revert to the original family.
These prophet regularly castigated the leaders for setting up laws that were rigged to clearly favor the rich and powerful. The criticized the corruption of judges to favor the rich and powerful. It was the religious and political leaders of the nation that were the focus of the condemnation of God. They also opposed, as did the Deuteronomic code the practice of usury--loaning money out at interest..
The prophets pointed out how the coercive power of the state had been used to generate economic injustice; the correction was to turn that around using the power of the state to bring about economic justice--to stop using the power of the state to favor the rich while depriving the poor of just treatment under the laws.
By the way, you also screwed up the story of David and Nathan in 2 Samuel 12. The story is about a rich man who screws over a poor man by the use of the power available to him--i.e. the man with many wives (David), and the man (Uriah) with only one wife (Bathsheba), and David's unjust use of lies to get Uriah killed so he could have Bathsheba for his own sexual pleasure. This is not a story of government seizing property unjustly.
Economic Morality?
I find interesting the Faith in Public Life assertion that the term "moral values" for many people includes "economic justice", the concept that an unequal possession of wealth is unjust and immoral. There is certainly attention paid all through the Old and New Testaments to care for the poor, widows and orphans. According to Jesus' teaching in Matthew 25, how we treat the "least" of our neighbors is a reflection of how much we love Christ himself, and therefore of how we will end up in the eternities. Nevertheless, while individual charity is a duty God places on us all, he does not call for the abrogation of private property nor of private labor or even of lending money at interest, all activities which are the subject of parables that praise the hard working shepherd, farmer, and investor as analogies of how we please God.
Unfortunately, "economic justice" seems to be the rationale used for using the coercive power of government to take funds away from those who have earned them, and give them to those who have not earned them. Those who exercise this power of coercion to give to the poor by taking from the "rich" seem to think they deserve the reward promised to the charitable by God. But the most relevant parable is the one the prophet Nathan told to King David about the rich man (government) who takes a lamb from the poor man (the taxpayer) in order to feed his guests and impress them with his generosity. David had abused his power as king in order to commit adultery with Bathsheba and kill her husband. Rulers who take credit for generosity with the wealth others have earned are, like David, self-serving hypocrites.
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