Why 'Moral Values' Really Does Mean Faith-Based and Hot-Button Issues

June 08, 2009 12:29 PM ET | Dan Gilgoff | Permanent Link | Print

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.