A values voter’s trap
Mon Apr 28, 12:15 AM ET
By Austin Dacey
Woody Allen confesses that he once failed a philosophy exam when he was caught looking into the soul of the student next to him. Like metaphysics, morality is not the kind of thing that can be lifted from someone else. And to the extent that one tries, one usually loses it in the process. This could pretty well describe what has been happening lately with the Democratic Party’s relationship to religion and values in public life.
(Illustration by Alejandro Gonzales, USA TODAY)
After the failed presidential bid of 2004, a now-famous (and famously flawed) exit poll of so-called values voters launched a thousand liberal soul-searches. The Democratic Party concluded that because values voters are religious, the way to Washington must lie on the road to Damascus. Since then, it has been closing the God gap that is thought to stand between it and the White House.
Meanwhile, the social agenda of many theologically conservative Christians in America has been expanding beyond abortion and gay marriage to encompass issues such as poverty, the environment, HIV/AIDS and the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. A 2005 open letter signed by more than 60 religious leaders called on the U.S. Congress to consider the federal budget as a moral document. Barack Obama has said, “We need Christians on Capitol Hill, Jews on Capitol Hill and Muslims on Capitol Hill talking about the estate tax. … We need an injection of morality in our political debate.” The evangelical activist and author Jim Wallis heralds the arrival of a Religious Left.
Our loss
I’m all for more serious moral debate in politics, and I support the right of all to display their conscience in public, whether it be red, blue, or purple. Yet, as an American who is both liberal-minded and entirely secular, I can’t help but wonder what we might be losing along the way.
For what it now means to say that poverty or health care are values issues is that evangelicals have started talking about them, and what it now means for liberals to take values seriously is to start talking about them as evangelicals do. As at the recent Compassion Forum among the Democratic candidates, faith and values are now running mates. Such thinking precludes the possibility of a public moral language that transcends sect and invokes the civic values we share as Americans and world citizens.
This would be a betrayal of a great tradition. The Judeo-Christian virtues of love, mercy and humility have a unique place in the moral heritage of the West. But no less important is the Stoic and neo-Stoic philosophers’ notion of universal human reason — a secular conscience — that reveals our earthly good and grounds our natural rights.
We Americans have our own civic scriptures. The American testament has its Creation narrative: Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, The Declaration of Independence. It has an Exodus: the Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation and the Letter to the Danbury Baptists; its Psalms, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The original moral values are enunciated in the Preamble to that American Talmud, the Constitution: justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare and liberty.
Sadly, this rich vocabulary of values has fallen out of currency among today’s leaders. Could it be that the wrong lesson was taken from 2004?
Authentic morality
The Pew Foundation scrutinized the 2004 polling data and found that the answers were highly dependent on the framing of the questions. When asked to describe moral values in their own words, only 18% mentioned religion, while more spoke of personal integrity or discerning right from wrong. Recently, the Interfaith Alliance found 68% of Americans believe that presidential candidates should not use their religion to influence voters.
Maybe what Americans most want are not religious leaders as such, but leaders who can speak with authenticity in the language of morality.
Until we can recover the neglected tradition of secular conscience, liberals like me will remain lost in the wilderness between the Religious Right and the Religious Left.
Austin Dacey is the author of the recently published book The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life.