Broad Vote on Narrow Agenda Disturbing
Ethicists, Theologians Reflect on ‘Moral Values' in Election

The emergence of “moral values” as the key issue for 22 percent of the voters in the Nov. 2 presidential election had many Christian voters cheering, but ethicists and theologians have called into question the five “non-negotiable” moral issues highlighted in voting guides produced by conservative Protestant and Catholic religious leaders.

Ethicists and theologians interviewed by Vital Theology said they doubt that the issues highlighted by the voting guides were the most important issues for the election or for Christianity.

Some also questioned whether the language of values has any connection to Christianity.

One theologian who challenged the conservative guides contended that “lay people have been misled by their ministers and … fundamentally abused by the politicians.”

The five ” non-negotiable” issues highlighted in three conservative Christian voting guides are abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem-cell research, human cloning and homosexual marriage.

Those issues are identified as the key to making election choices in nearly identical language found in guides produced by Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs (Colo.)-based organization headed by James Dobson; Rick Warren, the best-selling author and influential pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif.; and Catholic Answers, an independent group based in San Diego.

The guides were created and distributed by organizations with wide influence. Dobson's radio program reaches 200 million people daily and 80 stations carry his television show. Warren 's book, The Purpose Driven Life , has sold 4 million copies and is a long-time leader of The New York Times best-seller list. A spokesman for Catholic Answers told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the organization expected to distribute 3 million copies of its guide, including orders from 1,500 Catholic parishes.

Three additional guides are highlighted in sidebars in this issue of Vital Theology .

Nationwide, more voters cited moral values than the economy/jobs (20 percent), terrorism (19 percent) or Iraq (17 percent). Voters who cited moral values as their top priority voted 79 to18 percent in favor of President Bush over Sen. John Kerry.

May: Dualists See Absolutes

“I think the word ‘values' has tended to be illegitimately captured by the right,” said William F. May, Cary M. Maguire Professor of Ethics emeritus at Southern Methodist University. “The values that they reflect religiously are more the values of Manichean dualism than they are of Christian monotheism.”

Dualists hold to the metaphysical outlook that there is the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan , good vs. evil, light vs. dark—all stated in absolute terms.

Dualists, said May, “tend to associate the kingdom of God and the kingdom of light with one's own views and the kingdom of Satan with one's own enemies. One sees things in terms of absolutes and takes the devil very seriously because one makes the devil co-equal with God.”

There is a sense of evil in Christian monotheism, but it is not co-equal with God, said May, who is now affiliated with the University of Virginia Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life.

“We misunderstand evil if we associate it simply with our enemies and do not look to the darkness in one's own heart,” said May. “This spells out for the dualists an association of isolated issues that they make the absolute tests.”

Christian monotheists, on the other hand, are inclined to be less grimly pessimistic because the demonic is not co-equal with God, he said. “They are inclined to see that all fall short of the glory of God, not only one's enemies but one's self.”

A range of moral values needs to be considered, said May, who took issue with the family values movement as inadequate.

Conservatives talk about family values, but very little about the structuring of the social setting of our common life that would actually support the human family, said May.

“You can pay whatever you can get away with if you are part of corporate management instead of what would be a just wage for a worker and his or her family,” said May. “Not only do you absolve the private sector of responsibility of meeting the needs of families, but you would deny to the government a role and place in providing a safety net. You not only hold to that view, but you establish tax reductions for the wealthy so that you will create budget deficits as far as the eye can see and, therefore, provide yourself with a ready excuse for never adequately supporting that safety net for working poor and the education of their families and health care of their children.”

He also took issue with the pro-life movement.

“My complaint about the pro-life movement is that it tends to be pro-life for nine months while the child is in the womb,” he said. “After that, the mother and child are on their own .”

The “radical right” shows a “breath-taking indifference” to social policies that protect families, said May, “and yet one rather hypocritically calls this an affirmation of family values when you do not engage in support of those mothering institutions that would help to mother mothers.”

Moody: Good News, Bad News

There is good news and bad news in the exit polls, said Dwight A. Moody, who teaches a course on public theology at Baptist Seminary of Kentucky, in Lexington , and is dean of the chapel at Georgetown College , in Georgetown , Ky.

“It's a good thing that people think that moral issues and ethical issues matter in the public sphere and that they're paying attention to the ethical dilemmas of our day when making political decisions,” said Moody.

The downside, said Moody, is that “this moral urgency which fueled so much of the election was so narrowly focused as to be frightening.”

Moody said he sympathizes with Mark Knoll, the Wheaton College historian who announced his intention to refrain from voting in the presidential election.

“He feels like I do that if you're going to vote on moral issues, the Democrats and the Republicans each have half of the right ones” and neither party has a broad-based vision of morality, said Moody, a distant cousin of 19 th century evangelist Dwight L. Moody.

Moody said he does not believe the issues cited in the conservative voters guides were the most important moral issues of the election.

“When you eliminate fundamental things like war and peace, wealth and poverty, racism and violence … you have eliminated most of what the Bible talks about,” he said. “You have eliminated most of what the long tradition of Christian social ethics has dealt with.”

Moody said the guides push aside the major issues and elevate a couple of secondary issues as well as some very minor issues.

“The whole issue of life and death is a very prominent moral issue and to that extent, euthanasia and abortion certainly fall under that umbrella of life and death issues,” he said. “I think they do need public discourse and we do need political leaders who are fluent in the public discourse of these issues.

“But when you raise stem-cell research to this level, I just disagree with that entirely. Homosexuality doesn't rise to that level and human cloning is still such a far-fetched idea as to not be a front-burner agenda item. You've got people dying in America because they can't get health care, mental health care or even something to eat.

“For the religious right to equate these five issues as the moral agenda of our nation is actually pathetic,” said Moody. “These lay people have been misled by their ministers and they are being fundamentally abused by the politicians.”

In some cases, the issues raised by the voting guides serve as replacement for real issues, Moody alleged.

“Rather than taking a position on civil rights and prejudice and poverty in the South, (ministers and politicians) have encouraged the people to be indignant about a far less significant problem in the South, which is homosexuality, or the Ten Commandments in the schools,” he said. “They've allowed the people to become self-righteous or have this righteous indignation about homosexuality, which is a far more insignificant problem in the American South than is racism. If ministers would lead their people to feel as deeply about racial issues as they do the sexual issues, we would have a much more humane place to live.”

Georgetown College is affiliated with the Kentucky Baptist Convention, which is a partner in the Southern Baptist system. But Georgetown does not consider itself a Southern Baptist school. It has produced Gary Bauer, a Reagan administration official who sought the Republican nomination for president in 2000, and Brenda Bartella Peterson, the Democrats' senior advisor on religion, who was removed from that position for supporting an effort to delete the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.

Cartwright: Consider Convictions

A pathos surrounds the use of values language, said Michael Cartwright, dean of ecumenical and interfaith programs at United Methodist-affiliated University of Indianapolis , and a teacher of theology and ethics.

The Indianapolis faculty just happens to be interested in having a discussion of core values. The proposition that informs such a discussion for any organization, said Cartwright, is that if enough values are named, the organization will discover what it is about and solve its identity woes.

“I think the pathos is there because at some level a great number of us want to have our convictions embedded in the practice of everyday life,” he said.

“Unfortunately, the public policy debates about issues moral and social, controversial and noncontroversial, don't lend themselves toward engaging in what Mark R. Schwehn has called the ethics of everyday life,” said Cartwright. Such issues are often detached from everyday lived reality and individuals are left with the task of connecting these issues to their lives. Schwehn is professor of humanities at Christ College , Valparaiso University , and director of the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and Arts.

When moral issues become confusing, people turn to codes of ethics to make sense of them, said Cartwright.

“Certain moral positions come to be related to those codes, and values then seem to be meaningful relations to those codes,” he said. “So we cling fiercely to that code which seems most meaningful to us, whether or not we're really clear about the issues involved.”

For example, said Cartwright, people are not very articulate about the moral significance of Christian marriage, but they are pretty clear that somebody's married when they have a license from the state. The prospect of participating in a wedding where there is no license from the state scares some ministers to death, he said. It is odd, however, that on one hand you want the minister to bless the marriage, but somehow that blessing is not adequate if you do not have a license.

“There's this kind of loose fit surrounding what we think are the ends and goods of marriage or what we think are the appropriate stances about being parents or the rights of parents over their progeny. So we cling to these codes as if that somehow makes our values clear.”

Cartwright encourages Christians to reflect on convictional communities rather than on values. Convictions, he said, are overlapping because people live their lives in multiple communities.

“I think it is possible for people to get into the language of values and come out with greater clarity about what convictional communities they reside in and how those communities meaningfully exist over time with particular values,” said Cartwright.

The key move, said Cartwright, is whether a value is held or chosen.

When students are required to analyze a written moral argument in the classroom, Cartwright often concludes the discussion by asking whether they found the article to be convincing.

Inevitably, some students respond: I found it convincing but I was not persuaded.

After hauling out a dictionary on many occasions to show students that “persuaded” and “convinced” are used the same way, Cartwright said he is certain that students are simply trying to preserve the illusion that they are the arbiters and that they can change their stance at any point.

“So values language, not so coincidentally, jibes with the ethics of everyday life of consumerism,” said Cartwright. “We are so accustomed to making consumer-driven judgments that morals become a part of that same kind of faulty reasoning, as if we could put on this value today and that value tomorrow.”

Cartwright likens the desire to try on different values to a scene in the movie Desperately Seeking Susan in which Madonna and Rosanna Arquette put on a variety of clothes and disguises, pathetically trying on different kinds of identities, none of which is truly satisfying.

A conviction is something that a person might hold because she or he has been persuaded that that is the case, even if one does not like it, said Cartwright. He cites his reluctance to become a father as an example of a conviction providing moral direction.

“I didn't have any natural inclinations to be a father,” he said, “but I felt a conviction that I ought to be a father in the context of my relationship with my wife, in the context of my relationship to church and in the context of my understandings as a theologian.”

That doesn't mean he chose to become a father. Rather, he did so out of a conviction that is held by several communities of which he is a member.

“Both conservatives and liberals see their judgments about morals as matters of voluntary disposition,” said Cartwright. “I don't share that view.”

The problem with the voting guides proposed by conservatives is that they specify a code of ethics and that code is detached from the ethics of everyday life or the moral practices that make it meaningful, said Cartwright.

Cartwright said he probably shares many of the concerns with individuals in the organizations that produced the voting guides, but he thinks that simple lists fail to deal with questions about how particular values reside within a community as it engages insiders and outsiders.

“I don't know what sense embryonic stem-cell research makes outside of parenthood, but I do know that many parents are anxious and motivated to get stem-cell research because of concerns for their children's health or their own health,” said Cartwright.

“I don't think you can talk about these things apart from practices,” he continued. “So I would link abortion to what it means to receive children in the context of Christian marriage and I would do that as a Christian. I think I could have the conversation with others, non-Christian and non-religious, by taking it there. But I am very distrustful of people thinking that we establish coherence by coming up with that kind of list.”

In his book, The Beleaguered Rulers: The Public Obligation of the Professional, William F. May includes a chapter on “the despised profession” of politician.

Dwight A. Moody is the author of Baptists Free and Faithful: Christian Discipleship in the 21 st Century , which describes his struggle for Baptist identity. He currently is editing a book of his collected newspaper columns.