Culture / February 21, 2025
Conservatism and the Moral Majority
Have family values been reduced to merely NIMBYism?
There was an interesting think piece in The Free Press by Charles Fain Lehman last weekend discussing the moral majority in American society and how that has changed in today’s culture.
The Moral Majority was an idea and movement put into action in 1979 by Reverend Jerry Falwell. It united the Protestant evangelical voters under an umbrella of moral convictions like being pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, and pro-nuclear family, as well as rejecting drugs, keeping public spaces clean and without vice, etc.
Republicans have come a long way from their family values core. Now, we have a president who has divorced three times. Has the Republican Party gone more libertarian so as to accommodate the larger coalition of Americans fleeing the authoritarian Left?
“Some argue that bawdy ‘Barstool conservatism’ now reigns among Republicans, a counterpart to Democrats’ most libertine tendencies,” Lehman writes. “That’s not quite accurate. There is no longer a constituency for politicizing Americans’ private choices — they can smoke and drink whatever, or sleep with whomever, they please. But there is a constituency — Trump mobilized it to great effect — that wants to control behavior they see as affecting society at large.”
Lehman lists examples: Americans don’t want gender-confused people to be discriminated against or demeaned, but they also don’t want men in women’s private spaces. The American people are very proud of being a nation of immigrants, but they don’t want a porous border through which illegal aliens — particularly drug dealers, rapists, and murderers — are allowed to make a mockery of our nation’s sovereignty.
In some ways, Lehman has a point. Americans just want to be left alone, and as long as people live and let live, there seems to be peace of a sort. This only works in isolation, though. We still do live in communities, and, sadly, the idea of being our own gods and beholden to our own morality isn’t conducive to living in a society. “Live and let live” only works if there are boundaries set up by a moral system. Perhaps what Americans are really acknowledging is that all of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; that even though private mistakes are made, we are not beyond the redemption of Christ, our Savior.
I do disagree with Lehman on his last point. There is still, in fact, a constituency that strongly believes in family values and a moral order set up by God, our Creator. Some conservatives, in fact, didn’t vote for Donald Trump because of his policy positions on those quasi-private choices. On the other hand, some conservatives did vote for Trump because he was much closer to lauded family values than the radical Kamala Harris.
A society must have norms and mores. If that system of right and wrong is based on individual moral systems instead of uniting under one moral system, then chaos and incoherency ensue. While Trump may be very wrong on issues like IVF, marriage, and abortion, he at least knows there are only two genders and that illegal immigration is bad. He was the lesser of two evils.
