The Devils We Know: Us and Them in America's Raucous Political Culture by James A. Morone

Author:James A. Morone [Morone, James A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History & Theory, American Government, United States, Social Science, Political Science, Anthropology, History, Cultural & Social, General
ISBN: 9780700620104
Google: JWR0oAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 22256423
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2014-01-15T08:11:32+00:00

Alternative Gospels

Contemporary moralizing lays the burden for American troubles squarely on the shoulders of troublesome Americans. There is an alternative to this emphasis on corrupt individuals.

Throughout American history, religion has inspired reformers to fight against legal and economic injustice—to fight for individuals against a corrupt or unjust system. Moral crusades rouse Americans to expand rights, overcome biases, attack inequity.

The paradigmatic cases are familiar: abolitionism after 1830, the women’s movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, the civil rights movement of the twentieth century. Each invoked a higher morality to challenge exclusion and injustice. But perhaps this different kind of moral crusade is most clearly illustrated by a less familiar case.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the social gospel movement self-consciously emphasized the moral responsibilities of the powerful toward the poor. Those who profited from the new economic order were accountable for the burdens it placed on their workers. As Walter Rauschenbusch, the best-known author of the movement, put it: “During the great industrial crisis in the ’90s, I . . . could hear virtue crackling and crumbling all around. If anyone has a sound reason for taking the competitive system by the throat in righteous wrath, it is the unmarried woman and the mother with girls.” Drawing on religious imagery and language, Rauschenbusch scorched the inhumanity of “our industrial machine” for the moral pressures that it put on good men and women.

Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps, an extraordinarily popular novel of the same period, pictured how a midwestern town (Topeka, Kansas) would change if all its leaders were guided by the simple question, “What would Jesus do?” There is plenty of silliness throughout the book. But Sheldon imagines the business leaders of the Gilded Age getting religion and running out to meet their workers—to shake their hands and listen to them with respect.

The sinking feeling one gets trekking across the tomes and the tapes of the contemporary morality project comes from the complete absence of even this (rather feeble) social vision. The poor ought to learn to give back to society—more church and less crime, more discipline and fewer delinquents. But rarely a word on how the society and its rules might be biased. Not a hint of going out and listening to the workers with respect, much less helping them struggle with the dislocations of rapid economic change.

Despite the thunder, American spiritual life is not going to hell. What all that moralizing does is to organize American rhetoric against social justice, against progressive politics, against national community altogether. In an era when many poor Americans struggle extraordinarily hard, the preachers blame them for their own poverty, turn them on one another, and turn Americans against themselves.

The story of moral depravity is well worn. Americans have survived their own unprecedented wickedness—many times. The moralizing routine was already old when the Synod of 1679 published its list of sins. The real threat is not moral decline. It is what Americans do to their own society in the name of arresting moral decline.

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