NOTES FROM THE HINTERLAND
OF CONSERVATIVES AND LIBERALS
PART TWO: VALUES, VALUES EVERYWHERE
By Laurie Meunier Graves
Some time has passed since the November election, but the chatter about
conservatives and liberals and their respective values hasn’t died down. Red
state, blue state, abortion, and gay marriage all give the pundits fuel for a
merry debate, and there are a couple schools of thought. One is to take it
seriously and examine what is perceived as a deep and divisive philosophical
divide between liberals and conservatives. Another is to entirely dismiss
the debate and call it an overblown simplification. As a liberal, I feel
perfectly comfortable straddling the line and thinking that there might be
truth in both schools of thought.
In last month’s essay, I examined the notion of happiness and hard work and
how they pertained to conservatives and liberals. I used the personal to
examine the universal, and that’s exactly what I will do in this essay. As
with happiness and hard work, we can look at individual lives to see how
they are shaped by moral values and if indeed there is any great difference
between the way conservatives live and the way liberals live. In other
words, in this country does a pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, liberal family
live a noticeably different life than an anti-abortion, anti-gay rights,
conservative family does? If so, what are the differences? And if not, why
are there so many perceived differences?
Allow me, then, to describe two families—one conservative, one liberal—from
my very own town of Winthrop (population 7,000 or so), nestled among the
lakes just outside the state’s capital. The conservative family—let’s call
them the Smiths—had three daughters, a stay-at-home mother, and a father. In
other words, a traditional family. The liberal family—the Graveses (yes, my
family)—had two daughters, a stay-at-home mother, and a father. Another
traditional family.
The oldest two Smith girls were approximately the same ages as my own
daughters. They all went to school together, played in band together, were
in the same Girl Scout troops, and took swim classes at the public beach. We
parents volunteered for all the usual things that parents volunteer for, and
for several years my husband and Mrs. Smith helped put together a calendar
as a fundraiser for the high school’s music department.
For several years, we saw quite a bit of the Smiths. Sitting in the shade at
the public beach, Mrs. Smith and I chatted while the children were in
swimming classes. We camped with the Girl Scouts. We traveled with the band
when there were concerts. We talked about our children, the school, our
daily lives, and it’s my guess that an outside observer would have seen
little difference between the two families. Except for one thing. On Sunday,
the Smiths spent most of their day at the local fundamentalist church, and
we spent Sunday lolling around the house in our pajamas.
As it turns out, this one thing is a big difference, so big, in fact, that
it plays a large part in dividing us from them, the secular from the
religious, blue state from red state. This difference has come to be
perceived as the much discussed moral values issue, but, in fact, moral
values to the fundamentalists really mean religious values, and what are
values, secular as well as religious, if not ideas? And, if there is one
thing we have learned in this election, it’s that ideas trump reason, fact,
and even self-interest.
How else to explain the voting habits of the red states, which tend not only to
be very religious but are also among the poorest in the nation? How else to
explain why they would vote for an administration that favors the rich, has a
disdain for environmental laws, and has hurled the country into a needless
war? All these things the red states are willing to overlook because George
Bush is one of them, a moral man, and a religious man who speaks their
language. He believes that religion, specifically Christianity, should be
front and center in all aspects of life, including politics, and so do they.
He believes he has found the answer to life’s mysteries and problems, and so
do they. He believes these answers begin and end with the Bible, and so do
they. In fact, this belief is so strong, so ardent, that there is no room
for doubt and often not room for any other beliefs. There is only one true
way.
This sort of vehemence is often baffling to a secularist and a liberal, and
the usual response is to try to drill in the facts over and over. Liberals
feel that if the religious right could only hear the facts enough times then
eventually they would be swayed. But, as we have learned, this just isn’t
so. Passion will always triumph over facts, and the fundamentalists are
nothing if not passionate. They are also a significant part of the country’s
population, more so in red states but also in blue states. As their numbers
grow, so does their ability to impose their will on the rest of the country.
Slowly but surely, they have been chipping away at abortion rights, gay
rights, the New Deal, in short, all the things that liberals hold dear and
believe make a great country.
Where does this leave someone like me, a secular agnostic who firmly
believes in the separation of church and state? Who believes that there is
no one true religion. Who thinks religious belief is fine as long as that
belief is kept private and is not imposed on anyone else. More and more, I
feel completely alienated from this country, from the red states, even from
my neighbors. If my daughters were still in school, would I be able to have
relaxed conversations with Mrs. Smith? Knowing her religious affiliation, I
am sorry to say that I would not. After the last two elections, an almost
intolerable tension has emerged between secularists and Christian
fundamentalists, a tension that was always potentially there but that has
been brought to the surface by the Bush administration and by the times
in which we live.
Fundamentalism is, of course, not strictly a Christian phenomenon, and other
countries must deal with the same tensions we have here in the United
States. And what happens when opposing strains of fundamentalism find
themselves in the same country or the same area? We know what happens.
Religious civil war is what happens. We have Ireland, Israel, and Palestine
as perfect examples of this, and Iraq is heading in the same direction. For
centuries, Europe was convulsed by religious wars and saw firsthand how
ugly, wasteful, and destructive they were. This might explain why many
European states are so committed to secularism.
To me, the solution to religious strife and warfare is quite clear, and it
benefits everyone, the secular and the religious, in all their diversity. In
the New Yorker in an article about the Scottish Enlightenment, David
Denby does a wonderful job of articulating the beauty of a system that
accommodates religious belief while at the same time relying on the order
brought by “institutions like the legal system, the civil service, schools
and universities, and business and commerce. The administration of such
enterprises is the ideal of ‘instrumental rationality,’ as Max Weber called
it, by which things run impersonally and reasonably well for everyone…one
that allows the greatest individual development, the greatest freedom.” Denby goes on to define a concept that is so important that I think it
should be emblazoned in public places. “It’s a frame-work that most
Americans, even very religious Americans (the emphasis is mine), actually
depend on from day to day—the unspoken rationale of American secular
liberty.”
American secular liberty. How many of our leaders would dare proclaim this
is the basis for a decent government and a decent society that has room for
not one belief but for many beliefs? One that respects religion but does not
emphasize it. One that respects that some people aren’t in the least bit
religious. Not many of our leaders would admit such a thing, even though it
is perfectly true.
In the long run, everyone, the religious as well as the nonreligious, has
the potential to thrive in a liberal, secular society. So far, it is the
system that affords the greatest freedom to the greatest number of people.
And what freedom can be greater than the freedom to believe or not to
believe? Thousands and thousands of lives have been lost when individuals
have been denied this freedom. To my way of thinking, this freedom is the
greatest of all moral issues, so great in fact, that all other issues should
flow from it.
