Red, Blue and Purple

American Views on Personal Morality and the Law

Progressive Americans could be forgiven for thinking that things had turned screwy-or scary-in 2004. Everywhere one looked after the presidential elections, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who many thought had flamed out with his uncompromisingly conservative religious positions and ubiquitous media role since the Reagan years, was all over the airwaves. One night, he was explaining to Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball the failings of an ad campaign by the United Church of Christ, a liberal Protestant denomination, that depicted a church open to gays and lesbians-insinuating, according to Falwell and colleagues, that evangelical churches in America were bigoted. Another day he was on Meet the Press debating with progressive evangelical Christian minister Jim Wallis about the role of religion, politics, law, and society.

The rush to engage Falwell, Reverend James Dobson, and other leading lights of the Christian right as interpreters of the American public’s attitudes about politics in general and the law and personal morality in particular was a result of one frame the media had quickly placed on the 2004 election results: the importance of “values.” As the New York Times reported,

In the survey, a striking portrait of one influential group emerged-that of a traditional, church-going electorate that leans conservative on social issues and strongly backed Mr. Bush . . . . Bush appealed overwhelmingly to voters on terrorism and to many others on his ability to handle the economy. But what gave him the edge in the election, which he won 51 percent to 48 percent, was a perceived sense of morality and traditional values.

The election results were not necessarily a surprise to those who had worried throughout the campaign about whether the Democrats had a “church gap.” Still, it was dismaying that such strutting by the Christian right came so soon after an unusual trifecta in the “gotcha” category of politics: who could have predicted that 2003 would have seen conservative author and former drug czar and cabinet secretary Bill Bennett exposed as an inveterate gambler who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in video poker in Nevada and New Jersey? Or that conservative radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh would be admitted to treatment with a drug problem centering on illegally obtained painkillers? Or that the late Dixiecrat senator Strom Thurmond would be disclosed to have fathered a child with an African American woman?

Were the election results, then, a sign of the continued vitality of the “culture wars,” twenty-odd years after that term had first been used? Were they also a sign of the “stealth&...