ON THE WORLD SCENE

RELIGION AND POLITICS: RED HOT ISSUE; WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SHAME? Religion has emerged as a big issue in the 1984 U.S. presidential campaign. President Reagan's stands against legalized abortion and the federal ban against prayer in the public schools anger the secularists. Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, a practicing Roman Catholic, is dogged on the campaign trail by "right-to-life" groups, who lambast her for her contention that while she is "personally" against abortion, that view should not interfere with upholding governmental policy regarding the right of women to have abortions. Both Ms. Ferraro and New York State governor Mario Cuomo have been roundly criticized for their ambivalent positions by the Archbishop of New York.

In general, the issue is not so much one of religion per se as what the moral basis of U.S. society is destined to be: a morality broadly based upon the Judeo-Christian heritage of the country — or one built upon the shifting sands of humanistic moral relativism. President Reagan has reacted angrily to comments from the liberal press who worry about whether his position undermines the guarantees provided for in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which declares that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." The President's response is that the issue is not one of "establishing religion" but rather one of rekindling a sense of religious-based public morality.

Early in the year, an article entitled "Reagan Success: Curbing Social Spending" in the February 2, 1984 LOS ANGELES TIMES analyzed Mr. Reagan's moral agenda:

President Reagan set out in 1981 to return the country to the ideals of an earlier era — a time, he recalled, when government and private charities stood by to help the old and the sick but when able-bodied Americans proudly preferred to get by on their own ambitions and energy.

It was also, he remembered, a time when morality and social values were molded by church and family, not by liberal court decisions or by government regulations that mandated school busing, legalized abortion and outlawed prayer in the schools. Reagan's speeches during the 1980 campaign had hit home with voters who believed that the social programs of the 1960s had promised too much, accomplished too little and spawned problems of their own. And his calls for a return to old-fashioned verities had echoed a growing public concern that society was losing its moral bearings.

The President is persisting in his attack on secular ideals in this campaign as well — to the dismay of the liberal intellectuals. In a speech before the Economic Club of Chicago, the President declared an end to America's "hedonistic heyday" of false values. In the past few decades, he added, "many of us turned away from the enduring values, the faith, the work ethic and the central importance of the family."

During the Republican convention in Dallas, Mr. Reagan appeared before a prayer breakfast. In his speech he said, "Politics and morality are inseparable, and as morality's foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related.... We establish no religion in this country nor will we ever.... But poison our society when we remove its theological underpinnings. We court corruption when we leave — it bereft of belief."

The President said religion played a critical role in the abolition of slavery and in other important events in the United States. But he added that in the 1960s "the climate began to change — began to make great steps in secularizing our nation and removing religion from its honored place." Those opposing school prayers in the name of tolerance were not tolerant at all, he said.

"Without God there is no virtue..." the President said. "Without God we are mired in the material....without God democracy will not and cannot long endure."

The liberals are most angry that Mr. Reagan has drawn considerable political support from the so-called "religious right" — the more conservative evangelicals and "born again" churches. These fundamentalists were at one time not involved in politics to any great extent. Now they are because the country is on the moral skids and mainline churches have become so liberal that they are more or less swimming with the secular tide. Here are excerpts of an article in NEWSWEEK, Sept. 17, 1984 entitled "Faith, Hope and Votes":

What most appalls the New Religious Rightists is what they perceive to be the breakdown of family life and government hamstrings on parental prerogatives. The key issues on their political agenda — abolition of abortion on demand, aid to religious schools and even organized prayer in public classrooms — are all efforts to restore to parents some of the influence they once enjoyed over their own children's lives, even outside the family circle. Each of these issues is fraught with legal and other implications, and they are not exclusively religious — or limited to conservatives. "There's a widespread perception that values are falling apart," says cultural historian Christopher-Lasch, an influential liberal intellectual. "Violence, drugs and rapid social change are all making it hard to raise children as they ought to be raise. The collapse of the public schools, though due to many complicated causes, is also part of the dreary picture because they fail to uphold values and morality. We get no response to all this from the liberal quarter, where these issues are seen, if at all, as merely economic problems."

Also earlier this year, on March 20, 1984, the WALL STREET JOURNAL carried a powerful lead editorial entitled "School Prayer" condemning the moral decay in the country over the past two decades — and organized mainline religion's notable failure in countering it. The fact that this editorial appeared in the leading business daily, rather than in, say, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, says something about the state of religion:

The people mainly responsible for the school-prayer amendment are fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, who were aghast at what became of the moral quality of American society in the years from 1965 onward. The transformation of U.S. social and sexual mores in this period — from a fairly straight-laced tradition to one in which almost no behavior is socially proscribed??"is a large and complicated subject. But basically what happened is that the new morality of big cities such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco was imposed on the rest of the country by movies, TV, magazines, advertising, music, novelists, playwrights and, through default, by organized religion....

The wave of secularization that rolled across the U.S. in the past-20 years disrupted many patterns of moral behavior among adults and between parents and their children. The assault on established values was fast-moving and often well-packaged. Many Americans, especially parents, badly needed counterarguments and support to restore moral balance to their families and communities. But outside the evangelical and fundamentalist communities, that help never-arrived.

The mainline Protestant churches and the American Catholic Church failed to devote sufficient resources to creating a sturdy moral answer to aggressive modern secularism. Oh sure, the church doors are open every Sunday. But unhappily for those who enter, much contemporary American theology has come to be based in this period on a kind of dainty religious mush that has more in common with the sentiments of Rod McKuen and John Lennon than the precepts of Isaiah or St. John.

One can be sure there have been precious few sermons based on Isaiah 1-5 in mainline Protestant churches! According to William Rusher, editor of NATIONAL REVIEW, the U.S. has become, in the public, collective sector, virtually an atheistic society by default. He wrote in a March 23, 1984 syndicated column:

It is only in recent decades that atheist views (often more gently described as "secular") have grown vocal enough and strong enough to insist upon a stricter interpretation of the Constitutional provisions, and to persuade the courts to conform to their view....

The net effect was to drive acknowledgement of God's existence almost totally out of the collective life of the American society — a development, as some noted, that came close to making atheism our state religion by default.

The secularists, however, are dreaming of yet a better, "more exciting" society. Notice this prediction which appeared in an article "The Trend Toward Sexual Diversity" in the LOS ANGELES TIMES of May 11, 1984:

If variety really is the spice of life, get ready for more spice in the adult sexual arena, a Yale University sex expert suggests. Dr. Lorna J. Sarrel, of Yale Health Services, says diversity will be the key feature of adult sexual relationships of the future, and that sex experts also better gird for the trend. Her conclusions are contained in a report marking the 20th anniversary of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States.

Dr. Sarrel and other SIECUS board members contributing to the report also looked at trends among adolescents and the aging. "Adults will cohabit, marry, divorce, remarry, establish informal and complex kinship groups, have monogamous relationships of varying kinds, and have both same-sex and other sex relationships,” Dr. Sarrel, assistant clinical professor of social work in psychiatry, said. "In fact, many individuals will experience all of this in a single lifetime."

“The Decline of Shame"

One interesting indicator of America's moral slide is what happened in the fabled "Miss America" contest last year. The winner, Vanessa Williams, was forced to resign when it was revealed that she had consented to allowing pornographic photos be taken of her (about two years previously). The photos were purchased by the publisher of PENTHOUSE magazine, Bob Guccione, who made an enormous profit in running them.

In the September 21, 1984 issue of NATIONAL REVIEW magazine, in an article entitled "The Decline of Shame" author Mona Charen writes of the missing equation in the whole sordid affair — the absence of shame, guilt, and, lo and behold, sin.

Has anyone else noticed that the forced resignation of Vanessa Williams has been variously described as a "flap," a "downfall," and a "personal tragedy,” but nowhere as — what it would universally have been called twenty years ago — a scandal? The tone of our national response to this story raises the question: What has become of shame? Is there anything that can still make us blush, or have our sensibilities become too coarsened, our-capacity to make moral judgments too muddled?

When the story first broke, the buzz of speculation centered not on how it could be that a woman of Vanessa Williams's dignity could have done what she did, but, instead, on whether or not she would "fight to save her crown." Well-wishers filled her parents' Millwood, New York, home with flowers, telegrams, and letters of encouragement. Outside the hotel where she had scheduled the press conference to announce her decision, supporters carried placards reading, "We love you Vanessa and will always respect you." Respect? Milton Williams, Vanessa's father, explained why he wanted his daughter to fight. Giving up the title, he said, "could be seen as an admission of guilt, of having done something that was wrong and distasteful, and we don't feel she did." No hint of mortification from Dad. When Miss. WiIIiams announced that she would indeed resign, the assembled reporters let out a spontaneous groan of sympathy....

Twenty years ago, a nice girl like Vanessa would in all likelihood have been terrified lest her father discover that she had lost her virginity. But today, we are not surprised to see Mr. Williams stubbornly defending behavior that can only be described as obscene. It doesn't strike us as unseemly. We've grown customed to "progressive" attitudes about such things.

And, in fact, it's easy to imagine what the response would have been if Mr. Williams's reaction had been more traditional. Suppose he had refused to talk to the press but word had leaked out that he thought his wayward daughter deserved a little trip to the woodshed. Surely the word "puritanical" would have followed him all the rest of his days. Joseph Papp, the Broadway producer, used that very term to characterize the decision of pageant officials to demand that Miss Williams surrender her title. "It's self-righteousness on the part of the pageant," he huffed, "puritanism of the worst kind."...

And while it would be unkind to seek to add to Miss Williams's pain, we should notice that her behavior was never actually condemned, by opinion-makers. On the contrary, TV interviewers, editorialists, and others have been at pains to grant Miss Williams a forgiveness she has never requested. Her own stated reason for resigning was the potential harm to the pageant and the deep division that a bitter fight may cause.”

Vanessa Williams acknowledged that she felt embarrassed, but she has not, as yet, shown contrition. The distinction is important. We can feel embarrassed by lots of things that are not inherently shameful: forgetting the name of a colleague just when an introduction is required, leaving a personal letter in the office Xerox machine. But we feel contrite only when we know we were wrong (or, to use another old-fashioned idea, sinful).

Yet this utter lack of contrition didn't trouble Susan Taylor. She wrote in U.S.A. TODAY that "Vanessa Williams should not be held responsible.... I don't think that any of us would want to be held accountable for everything we ever said or did." Miss Taylor doesn't explain who, if not ourselves, should be held accountable for our actions....

If there is unanimity on anything, it is that PENTHOUSE publisher Bob Guccione's behavior was loathsome.... It points up just what a slender reed the law can be if you rely on it to enforce ethics and morals. Mr. Guccione's actions were well within the law. Second, if he were not utterly shameless (another old-fashioned idea), his detestable magazine would not even exist.... His is the moral stature we can expect from a pornographer.... This man doesn't blink at sado-masochistic bestiality. Should we expect him then to blush, to display delicacy of sentiment, at the thought of embarrassing Miss America? "Man,” said Mark Twain, "is the only animal that blushes...or needs to.” This sorry tale should remind us just how much we need to.

Miss America pageant officials at this year's event (Saturday night, September 15) are hoping that the latest crop of contestants have no skeletons in the closet.

— Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau