Economic issues my have been decisive for the 1992 presidential election, but social and cultural questions were never far from voters' minds, especially the evangelical segment of the electorate. In recent years, America has become increasingly polarized in what sociologist James Davison Hunter calls a "culture war." Hunter argues in Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America that the most contested political issues–abortion, gay rights, education, public funding for art, the composition of the Supreme Court–are not the marginal concerns of a few zealous lobby groups, but reflect profound moral and religious differences within American society.
On one side of this struggle are the orthodox party: conservative Catholics, Jews, and evangelicals who have normative and supernaturally derived views about what is right or wrong. They are pitted against the progressives: liberal Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and secularists who question whether absolute moral standards exist and promote tolerance and diversity as the basis for social harmony. Since the November election, this cultural divide between the orthodox and progressives has surfaced once again as policy proposals and appointments of President Clinton reveal his stand on abortion, gay rights, and public education. In reaction, many evangelicals are gearing up for another battle to impede America's moral decline. There is even talk of resuscitating the Moral Majority.
Leaving aside the merits of Hunter's analysis and the thorny questions surrounding a Christian response to politics, the book Culture Wars does underline one of the chief characteristics of American evangelicalism, namely, moralism. Throughout the history of the United States, evangelicals have mobilized most of often against groups, ideas, or practices thought to be immoral, and therefore, a threat to the nation. Northern evangelicals, for instance, advocated the immediate abolition of slavery, irrespective of the political consequences, because holding slaves was a sin. So too, evangelicals responded to the dangers of alcohol, not by forging an attitude of moderation and responsibility, but by pushing for laws that would prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol. So too, the flap over teaching evolution in public schools which began in the 1920's has little to do in evangelical minds with the merits of different scientific explanations, but more often has resulted from fear about the corrosive effects of evolutionary teaching on the morals of impressionable youths.
The point of highlighting evangelicalism's habitual concern for upright conduct is not that morality is unimportant or that such matters as slavery, drunkenness, and evolution do not call for a Christian response. Rather, the question is, Why do evangelicals so often resort to moral categories when struggling with personal and public issues when other factors (theological, economic, and political) are often just as important? What we see in the history of evangelical involvement in public life is the triumph of what Joseph Haroutunian described as a move from "piety to moralism," where the danger of sinful conduct supersedes questions about knowledge, beauty, and the nature of reality. But to describe the problem is not to explain it. For an explanation of evangelical moralism some attention to the history of religious and political developments in the early United States is in order.
At the time of the nation's founding, the United States faced a profound crisis of authority. Gone were the old institutions such as the monarchy and a notional state church that provided order and stability for cultural and political life. In fact, this was precisely what the revolution was about: getting rid of those old corrupt European institutions. Centralized power, whether in the crown or in the church, was considered coercive. For that reason the founders advocated limited government and religious freedom. This would prevent tyranny from rearing its ugly head in the new world.
Nevertheless, America's political elite believed that virtue was crucial to the well-being of the nation. The political philosophy of the revolution, republicanism, taught that virtue was essential to a free and democratic society. The church and the state could not force people to behave in certain ways, but individual citizens were still expected to behave. For deists who supported the revolution, the simple ethical teachings of Jesus, such as the Golden Rule, were sufficient for nurturing the virtue essential to national prosperity. Leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, even though suspicious of religious enthusiasm, believed churches were important for maintaining social order. According to George Washington, religion and morality were "indispensable to political prosperity." The theological baggage that often buttressed such morality was not desirable, but the moral habits that Christianity encouraged were quite desirable. Similarly, Protestant clergy enthusiastically embraced Enlightenment ideas about society and the good life, and in the process turned from older Calvinistic ideas about ethics by severing the moral teachings of Christianity from systematic theology. The Puritan tradition insisted that grace was necessary for genuine virtue (action that glorified God), and insisted that ethical decisions grew out of a theology of redemption. But the necessities of democracy and loss of traditional institutions forced American Protestants to defend ethics from the standpoint of the new political ideology.
Fears about the corruptions of the Old World, where the defenders of Christianity often resorted to the authority of tradition or to an established church in order to enforce moral norms, left American Protestants with little choice but to affirm the democratic axiom that all men and women, both regenerate and unregenerate, knew intuitively the difference between right and wrong. In so doing, American believers were able to defend Christian conceptions of virtue as necessary for the success of the new nation even though the principles upon which the nation was founded precluded any particular theology from being established.
Not only did the dynamics of American politics sever ethics from theology, but they also cemented the ties between Protestant mores and the American way of life. The United States at the time of its founding was overwhelmingly Protestant; 85% of the population could trace their cultural heritage to one of the branches of British Protestantism.
A broad consensus existed, therefore, on the kind of behavior that was acceptable. Evidence of this consensus can be found in the public schools of the new nation, where religious instruction was an important component of the curriculum. bible reading, prayer, hymn singing, and church history were included in public school curricula so that students would grow up to be virtuous citizens.
What made this practice objectionable was not just that Protestantism had been reduced to morality, but also that Protestant mores had become politicized. As immigrants came to the United States(many of them Catholic and Lutheran) and resisted the coercive nature of Protestant dominance in the schools, evangelicals who thought that virtue was necessary for the health of the nation branded such resistance as "un-American."
Of course, the political developments of the early United States do not alone explain the moralism that so often plagues evangelicalism. Particular emphases within evangelical theology– from a higher estimate of human nature to the revivalist's call for individuals to make a decision for Christ–also encourage the separation of ethics from doctrine. Nevertheless, the particular sociopolitical forces that have influenced American evangelicalism should not be ignored. Stripped of the traditional means for restraining evil–a strong state informed by a national church–Americans were forced to depend upon their own internal resources to withstand temptation. The American revolution and the Enlightenment philosophy that supported it made it difficult for Christians to argue for older, traditional Protestant understandings of individual virtue and public morality. To say that men and women could not be good apart form grace was also to admit that government was necessary for restraining evil, and thus, was to call into question the American experiment itself. For the founding fathers believed that Americans could be good without the heavy hand of the government, and they premised the well-being of the nation upon the inherent virtue of the citizenry.
Two lessons, then, can be learned from the relationship of religion and politics in the early republic. The first is to see clearly the mistake of reducing Christianity to ethics. No matter how much we might think Christianity produces good citizens, the ultimate aim of the gospel is not to make the world safe for democracy, but to reconcile God and sinners. Such reconciliation does not come through the good behavior of believers; rather, that good behavior, which in the lives of believers is often mixed with bad, is the result of grace. We cannot talk about morality apart from grace. This is another way of insisting that we cannot talk about ethics apart from theology.
The second lesson to be learned is to recover a Reformational understanding of the differences between the genuinely virtuous acts produced by grace which glorify God, and a mere civil righteousness that provides a standard for public life. While Calvin and Luther taught that the ordinary good works of obeying laws could not in any way please God, they still argued that sinners were capable of following and should adhere to public standards of moral conduct. Keeping this distinction in mind will not prevent Christians from having a voice in public debates about common standards of decency, but it should check the habit of identifying public morality with Christian ethics that has been so characteristic of American evangelicalism. A common understanding of public morality is indeed a proper topic for political debates, but by distinguishing between civil righteousness and Christian virtue, such debates need not degenerate into culture wars.
