In the October 22 Chronicle of Higher Education, George Marsden notes the high proportion of "seriously religious Americans," but points out that:
"our culture is also strikingly secular, even profane. Part of the paradox is explained by the many essential activities in a technological capitalist society like ours that allow little room for religious groups to exercise substantive control. Our government is officially separated from religions and depends on coalitions that can bring people with different beliefs together. Businesses serve diverse markets and focus on what will turn a profit. The media's commitments to freedom, diversity, and profit foster mass entertainments that would have shocked older religious sensibilities."
In today's New York Times, Frank Rich has a (not suprisingly) less nuanced take:
"There's . . . one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media's conventional wisdom, it is fiction. Everything about the election results - and about American culture itself - confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry's defeat notwithstanding, it's blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide. . . .
The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats. Those whose "moral values" are invested in cultural heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O'Reilly and the self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over MTV. William Bennett's name is now as synonymous with Las Vegas as silicone. The Democrats' Ashton Kutcher is trumped by the Republicans' Britney Spears. Excess and vulgarity, as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy no political party will ever stamp them out.
If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corporation, and each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest of Fox's very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless to say, Mr. O'Reilly. There are "real fun parts and exciting parts," said Ms. Cosby to Ms. Jameson on Fox News's "Big Story Weekend," an encounter broadcast on Saturday at 9 p.m., assuring its maximum exposure to unsupervised kids.
Almost unnoticed in the final weeks of the campaign was the record government indecency fine levied against another prime-time Fox television product, "Married by America." The $1.2 million bill, a mere bagatelle to Murdoch stockholders, was more than twice the punishment inflicted on Viacom for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction."
None of this has prompted an uprising from the red-state Fox News loyalists supposedly so preoccupied with "moral values." They all gladly contribute fungible dollars to Fox culture by boosting their fair-and-balanced channel's rise in the ratings. . . .
Mr. Murdoch and his fellow cultural barons - from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing C.E.O. of Viacom, to Richard Parsons, the Republican C.E.O. of Time Warner, to Jeffrey Immelt, the Bush-contributing C.E.O. of G.E. (NBC Universal) - are about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious entertainment. It's they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, who actually set the cultural agenda Gary Bauer and company say they despise."
Rich raises some good points, but voting based on media culture seems a fairly tricky business, especially given both parties' failures in this area. And while government certainly has a role to play, get-tough government measures are not necessarily the perfect remedy, as they bring their own unfortunate and often unintended consequences (see, e.g., stations pulling "Saving Private Ryan" for fear of FCC penalties). Even grass-roots protests seem ineffective, serving only to bring free publicity to the disfavored project (see, e.g., the outrage over the new film about Alfred Kinsey, sure to boost its box office). Perhaps this is another area where cultural change begins at home, with engaged parents who not only monitor their children's viewing habits and teach discerning media consumption, but also practice what they preach. (As Mister Rogers said, "The television may be the only electrical applicane that's more useful after it's been turned off.") A seemingly hopeless cause, I admit, but maybe part of building a culture of life is reversing the culture of coarseness, one family at a time.
Rob
[The author of the reflections below is Patrick J. Nugent, a recorded minister in the Society of Friends (Quakers). Rev. Nugent is principal of Friends Theological College, Kaimosi, Kenya. He holds a doctorate in the History of Christianity from the University of Chicago.]
Sightings 11/11/04
Values Judgement
-- Patrick J. Nugent
My exposure to American media is a bit limited these days. Living in rural Kenya, I have no television. I listen to National Public Radio by satellite and the BBC on the FM. I also read the Nation, the major national newspaper of Kenya. But even from this distance, I am sighting aspects of the media's treatment of religion that I find disturbing.
Alex Chadwick of NPR's Day to Day exemplified a growing trend in his coverage of President Bush's post-election press conference. He asked guest William Bennett, conservative activist and cultural watchdog, whether Bush's re-election indicates that Americans are now more concerned about "moral values" or "ethics," equating such concern with support for Bush. Bennett took his cue and played along.
The media's increasing use of "ethics" and "moral values" to refer specifically to "conservative moral values" and "conservative ethics" is troubling. This turn of speech suggests that those who do not hold conservative opinions on issues such as homosexuality, abortion, or the war in Iraq are not interested in morality, that conservative positions are the only moral ones, or that those who do not share conservative values have no values at all.
Quite to the contrary, the beliefs that gays should marry, the Iraq war is wrong, or women's reproductive choices should be protected are moral positions. By this I do not mean that these are necessarily morally right, but that they are positions that individuals hold on ethical grounds, and upon which they may legitimately disagree.
Those who opposed the president's re-election employed their own ethical arguments, based on clearly articulated values, about which conservatives were silent or in opposition. For instance, accusations that the president misled the American people about the causes for invading Iraq were based on moral concerns about truthfulness and the human costs of war.
My intention in this column is not to argue that liberal viewpoints on the issues debated in this election are more moral, but that they are, indeed, moral positions. (I am speaking as an evangelical Christian, a missionary training pastors in a burgeoning Pentecostal environment -- and a voting Democrat.) My point, rather, is to raise an alarm that the currency of language about ethics is being dangerously devalued. The Rev. Robert Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches expresses the stakes: "We need to work really hard at reclaiming some language. The religious right has successfully gotten out there shaping personal piety issues -- civil unions, abortion -- as almost the total content of 'moral values."
Indeed, when Americans take opposing positions on marriage, warfare, presidential truth-telling, campaign finance, the politicizing of the judiciary, or options in healthcare policy, we are reflecting and propounding opposing values, ethics, and moral positions -- whether they be conservative, liberal, radical, or flaky. The term "values" is not a synonym for "my values" or "conservative values."
If the careless diction of an increasingly inarticulate media abets political and religious conservatives to monopolize the vocabulary of ethics, then we risk losing our moral tongues entirely.
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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Today at Notre Dame (Room 119, O'Shaughnessy, 12:30 p.m.), Georgetown's Professor (and bioethicist) Tom Banchoff is giving a paper, "How the Embryo Became Political" (no link, yet, to the paper). This looks like it would fit in nicely with our recent conversations about stem-cell research. Here's a link for more information about the event, sponsored by Notre Dame's Nanovic Institute for European Studies and by the Center for Ethics and Culture.
Rick
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Michael asks me to say more about the "case against the possibility of jurisprudence being Christian and the possibility that Christianity contains a jurisprudence." I'm afraid I am reluctant to say much more, if only to avoid being unfair to the "case" by getting it wrong. That said, my sense is that the case is built on concerns about the radical separateness of Christian agape from the workings and structure of the "law", the latter being, in the end, the exercise of power by the state. (The "case" sounds, in other words, in the work of people like Stanley Hauerwas). But see, e.g., Thomas Shaffer, "The Christian Jurisprudence of Robert E. Rodes, Jr.," 73 Notre Dame Law Review 737 (1998). I will see if I can get Milner Ball to enlighten me on the matter.
Rick
As was made obvious by the conversations on Mirror of Justice, the moral issues implicated by this presidential election prompted a lot of soul-searching among many thoughtful Catholics. The outcome of this soul-searching may have determined the President, as reflected in this Beliefnet analysis:
"Bush’s strong performance among Catholics, it turns out, was crucial to his victory. Bush won Catholics 52%-47% this time, while Al Gore carried them 50%-46% in 2000. If Kerry had done as well as Gore, he would have had about a million more votes nationwide. According to Gallup Polls, only one Democrat since 1952 (Walter Mondale in 1984) lost the Catholic vote by this large a margin.
The Catholic impact was starker in key states. In Ohio, Bush got 55% of the Catholic vote in 2004 compared to just under 50% of them in 2000. That means a shift of 172,000 votes into the Republican column. Bush won the state by just 136,000 votes this year.
In Florida, Catholics made up 26% of the electorate in 2000. This year, they made up 28%. In 2000, 54% of Catholics went for Bush; in 2004, 57% of them voted for him. The combination of those two factors meant a gain of 400,000 voters in the Sunshine State—about Bush's margin of victory."
Rob
