Small-Town America by Wuthnow Robert

Author:Wuthnow, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

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Contentious Issues

The Moral Sentiments of Community Life

“I DRIVE DOWN THE INTERSTATE, and there are billboards advertising all these places with totally nude dancing. Just going down the interstate! So now you’ve got a six-year-old saying, ‘Hey dad, what does that mean, totally nude?’ I’m concerned where all this is headed. Or has already gone—this ‘anything goes’ mentality.” This is the moral corruption that worries Gene Fazio, a high school basketball coach in his early fifties who lives in a riverfront town of ten thousand. On all sides, the high school is surrounded by well-kept working-class bungalows, and down the street a few blocks are the small manufacturing plants and retail stores that have been operating here for more than a century. It isn’t just the blatant sexuality that bothers Mr. Fazio. There just seems to be something wrong with the world these days.

“The moral climate of our country has decreased precipitously over the last thirty or forty years,” complains Rev. Terry Thompson, a sixty-three-year-old pastor of a fundamentalist congregation called God’s Word Bible Church in a town of twenty-five hundred. On any given Sunday, nearly a quarter of the town’s population hears him preach. He works closely with two other fundamentalist preachers in town who share his beliefs. The mainline Methodist and Lutheran congregations also lean heavily toward conservative convictions about morality. “I graduated from high school in the 1960s,” Rev. Thompson explains, “and the teachers’ main complaint then was chewing gum and talking in class. We’ve seen that change tremendously. Kids are no longer taught that there are absolutes as far as right and wrong is concerned. There’s grave danger in the constant teaching that we are nothing more than glorified animals. There’s nothing special about us then. Kids have to find their sense of being special somewhere else. And very often for young girls and boys it’s in sexual fantasies.”

Living in a small town, it is easy to feel beleaguered by the outside world. The town is like a haven, but one that is threatened, a life raft adrift in a sea of change over which it has no control. Nobody in the town makes decisions that matter in the wider world. Influential business tycoons in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and Hollywood make those decisions, which are crafted by media moguls and government lawyers who have little understanding of small-town America. Meanwhile, a local business dies, a family moves away, a homecoming queen gets pregnant, and a promising athlete succumbs to a meth addiction. Even if the town is growing, it seems insignificant compared to the tens of millions who populate large cities. So a person thinks about all the forces over which they have little control and seizes on the few where some grasp is still possible.

“One of the prophecies in the Bible is that in the latter days, you will see people doing what is unnatural, such as women turning to women, and men turning to men. That was almost unheard of when I was a child.

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