| Family values? America owes it all to Britain The old-fashioned morality of US voters that swept George Bush back to power has its roots in a British tradition we have cast aside, says Gertrude Himmelfarb |
Exit polls in America have now been discredited as election predictors. But they were never intended to be that. They were meant to reveal attitudes, not votes — the reasons and motives animating the voters. In this respect the polls were accurate. And if we had been reading them correctly, for what they told us, not what we wanted to hear, we would not have been so ill-prepared for the actual electoral results. The issue that ranked first in importance, according to those polls, was not the war or security or the economy but “moral values”. (Of the 22% who placed it first in importance, 79% voted for George W Bush.) To most Europeans, including the British, that fact is bizarre, even frightening. The very term “moral values” is an embarrassment, not so much irrelevant as primitive and retrograde. To Americans, however, the “values” issue is so familiar as to require no explication or justification. We may not have expected it to rank quite so high in the polls, at a time of mounting casualties in Iraq, fears of terrorism at home, the loss of jobs and other pressing concerns. But its importance in the larger scheme of things has never been in doubt. That other countries — the French and Germans, perhaps — should have been disconcerted, even dismayed, by the American response is not surprising. But that the British should have been so is surprising. It was not so long ago, after all, that Margaret Thatcher had made it a theme of her administration — “Victorian values”, as critics derided it. Long before that — well before the Victorian age — under the aegis of Britain’s most celebrated thinkers (Adam Smith, David Hume, Edmund Burke, and scores of others), and under different labels (“moral sense” or “moral sentiments”), that idea had become the defining characteristic of the British Enlightenment and, one might go so far as to say, the moral foundation of British society. One of the intriguing aspects of recent history is the fact that the Americans have apparently inherited that British tradition, while the British have abandoned it to the extent that they are unable to recognise what was once theirs — they cannot see their own past in the American present. Americans have not been very helpful in explaining themselves. “Moral values” have been so narrowly construed as to deprive them not only of all historical connotation but of contemporary context as well. Most American commentators on the recent election have presented moral values as a euphemism for same-sex marriage and abortion (and, often, stem cell research as well). These have been important issues in this election but they do not begin to encompass the idea of moral values. The fact is that “moral values” appeared on the exit polls in at least two previous elections, 1996 and 2000, topping the list in both cases. And this was before the emergence of gay marriage, partial-birth abortions, or stem cell research as subjects of controversy. Nor can “moral values” be simply equated with religion in general or evangelicalism in particular. Again, it is true that religion plays an important part in the American disposition to take moral values seriously. Evangelicalism (the “Fourth Great Awakening”, as it has been dubbed) rose as a political force in America in the 1960s largely as a moral and social reaction to the counterculture. But the evangelicals have always been more diverse, politically and socially, than is commonly supposed; they are largely Republican, but by no means uniformly so. Nor have they always been as focused on moral or social issues as might be supposed; on the contrary, in recent years some of their leaders have retreated into religiosity, being more concerned with personal salvation than public policy. Republican activists had to make a special effort this year to get evangelicals to the polls. Nor are evangelicals as uniformly or rigorously “fundamentalist” as is thought. In Europe religion has been identified with evangelicalism, evangelicalism with fundamentalism, and Christian fundamentalism with an intolerance, bigotry, superstition, and potential for violence that make it a first cousin to Islamic fundamentalism. In fact, evangelicalism in America is a catch-all phrase for a large variety of beliefs. This is not to minimise the most conspicuous and enduring fact that America is far more religious than any other western country. The number of Americans who testify to a personal belief in God and heaven (more than 90% in some surveys) and who attend church weekly or more than weekly (more than 40%) continues to astound analysts and pollsters. (In good American fashion, only 60% to 70% believe in the devil and hell.) These religious facts have political consequences. Again, according to the exit polls, of the 40% who attend church at least weekly, 60% voted for Bush; and of the 15% who never attend church, almost 65% voted for Kerry. But this leaves the not insignificant figures of 40% of weekly churchgoers who voted for Kerry, and the 35% of those who never attend church who voted for Bush. Even the category of “churchgoing” is more amorphous than it might seem. There is much mobility among churchgoers, who move with surprising ease not only from one neighbourhood church to another, but from one Protestant denomination to another. A corollary of America’s religious exceptionalism is its propensity to be “moralistic”. It is at this point that the issue of moral values tends to be identified, or confused with, religion. Yet the two are quite distinct. They may overlap for some people but not for a great many others. The subjects that in this election have been equated with moral values, and thus with religion — same-sex marriage, abortion, stem-cell research — have an ethical status and dimension quite apart from religion. They derive more from tradition than from dogma, from a sense of family and community than from scripture or church. At issue in the same-sex debate is not homophobia or discrimination against homosexuals. It is not even the recognition by individual states of same-sex “unions” for the purposes of specified benefits and privileges; President Bush has spoken in favour of such civil unions. The issue is whether judges in one state (Massachusetts) could overturn the venerable conception of marriage as between a man and a woman, a decision that would oblige citizens throughout the nation to bestow full marital status on same-sex unions. The purpose of the Defence of Marriage Act (which Kerry voted against) was to prevent that judicial usurpation of the rights of states to determine for themselves the definition of marriage. It is in that context that the citizens of 11 states voted overwhelmingly to preserve the traditional idea of marriage — not because of scriptural injunctions but rather because such marriage has, for all of human history, been the basis of natural procreative unions and stable family ties. Similarly, the debate over abortion is more nuanced and non-theological than is often suggested. Abortion in the United States is legal through all nine months of pregnancy and the Supreme Court decisions establishing that right, although objected to by some, have not been seriously challenged. What is at issue is the desire of a large majority of Americans, influenced less by religion than by scientific discoveries graphically revealing the human foetus, to limit the practice of abortion by prohibiting, most notably, the gruesome procedure of partial-birth abortions. (This is when the baby is born alive and has to be killed by doctors.) Another highly disputed issue in the campaign was stem cell research, with the Democrats claiming that the president is blocking scientific progress and needlessly preventing the cure of debilitating diseases by prohibiting such research on religious grounds. But there is no ban on stem cell research itself; it is only federal funding that is limited. Again, it is not only for religious reasons that one may protest against treating nascent human life as a resource to be exploited and destroyed. There are good moral reasons to find this practice reprehensible — as well as good scientific reasons to be reminded that stem cell research of any kind will not, in the immediate future (as has been implied), cure those diseases — or even, perhaps, succeed in doing so in the future. In each of these cases the “religious right” did not take the initiative in bringing the issue into the forefront. It is the Massachusetts Supreme Court that opened the door to same-sex marriages; the pro-choice party that wants to legalise partial-birth abortion and abolish some long-time restrictions on abortion (such as the parental notification of minors seeking abortion); and “progressive” scientists who may be taking us down the eugenic road to elusive and inhumane progress. In each instance, it is the secular party that has been on the offensive and the religious that has been forced onto the defensive. It is at this point that we may turn to Britain for instruction, and more particularly to the British Enlightenment — to those “moral philosophers” who propounded the idea of a “moral sense” that is innate in human nature (or that has been so habituated by society that it is virtually innate). Religion for these philosophers had the important function of reinforcing and validating the moral sense. But the moral sense itself was presumed to be antecedent to religion. They were respectful of religion as a social institution, but they did not make religion an essential part of their moral philosophy. It was this convergence of moral philosophy and religious sensibility that was largely responsible for what the great historian Elie Halévy called “the miracle of modern England” — the fact that England was spared the revolutions (in the 18th and 19th centuries) that wrought havoc on the Continent. So in America today, evangelicalism has found its allies — not only among the more orthodox segments of Catholicism and Judaism, but also among those secular groups that rally together under the banner of cultural conservatism. There is, however, an anomaly in this situation that cannot easily be resolved. The unhappy fact is that, despite the outcome of this election, in which morality played so decisive a part, American culture itself is hardly a celebration of those “moral values” the people seem to hold so dear. Indeed, it is becoming less so as time goes on; American society has become inured to levels of licentiousness and pornography, violence and vulgarity that were unthinkable only a decade ago. In retrospect, the “cultural revolution” of yesteryear begins to resemble the cultural conservatism of this year. Perhaps the real lesson of this election is that there is an atavistic moral sense that emerges at critical moments like a national election; a kind of superego asserting itself. We don’t stop watching the trash on television but we elect a president who seems to speak for our better selves, for those moral values that we habitually violate.
Gertrude Himmelfarb is the author of The Idea of Poverty, The Demoralisation of Society: from Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, and The Roads to Modernity. Her writing on Victorian values inspired Margaret Thatcher |