Pubdate: Thu, 22 May 2003 Source: Charleston Gazette (WV) Copyright: 2003 Charleston Gazette Contact: http://www.wvgazette.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/77 HELLFIRE Morals Shaped America DURING a conversation, an Australian told an American: "We were the lucky ones. We got the criminals, and you got the Puritans." This story is passed around as a joke, but it conveys a clear message: Today's Aussies, descended from England's deported convicts, are a bawdy, happy-go-lucky, live-and-let-live people - while American society has been shaped by centuries of moralizing and taboos. The U.S. pattern is evident in the daily news, as the Bush administration endlessly tries to halt abortion, limit sex education, block stem cell research, foster school prayer and impose other moral goals of the so-called "religious right." "Morality is central to our politics and attitudes in a way that is not the case in Europe," wrote "virtues" champion William Bennett - before he was exposed as a compulsive gambling loser. America's moral basis is the theme of a new book, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History, by Brown University scholar James Morone. It's causing a stir in academia. "The moral urge which is at the heart of American politics and society" is a profoundly important force in the nation's identity, Morone contends. "Moralizing divides Americans into a righteous us and a malevolent them." He recounts chapter after chapter in which moralizers shaped America's beliefs, laws and attitudes. For example: * Colonial Puritans flogged, pilloried and hanged nonconformists such as Quakers. "The Scarlet Letter" was a badge of shame for loose women. Then the colony was seized by witch mania. * Victorian taboos reached a peak in the late 1800s, when Anthony Comstock enforced laws against "vice" and jailed hundreds of Americans for petty sins. Margaret Sanger was jailed eight times for advocating birth control. * Early in the 1900s, hysteria over rumors of "white slavery" impelled Congress to pass the Mann Act against transporting females across state lines, and to create the Bureau of Investigation, which later became the FBI. * The temperance movement, epitomized by saloon-smashing Carry Nation, pulled America into Prohibition - which became a tumultuous period of booze-smuggling that created organized crime. * Opposition to the teaching of scientific evolution flared in the famous 1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial," and remains alive today. * Currently, a major "sin" issue is whether gays will be accepted fully as Americans. "Us, them, and the shifting lines that run between them get drawn, disputed and dissolved in moral terms," Dr. Morone writes. "For better or worse, moral conflicts made America." Reviewing his book, The Washington Post agreed that "righteous zeal has proven pivotal to the formation of an American identity" to a much greater degree than in Europe. In the book, the professor says an opposite religious impulse, the "social gospel," spurred America's movement against slavery, and later against racial segregation, and brought "New Deal" and "Great Society" reforms. However, several critics have noted that those liberal advances arose from secular forces as much as from religious agitation. America's "hellfire" momentum today is epitomized by the Bush administration. The current issue of The Economist says Attorney General John Ashcroft has "become the country's moralizer-in-chief." It recounts: "Ashcroft has prosecuted 'medical marijuana' users in California despite a state initiative legalizing the practice. Has tried numerous ploys to challenge Oregon's assisted-suicide law, including encouraging the Drug Enforcement Agency to revoke the licenses of participating doctors.... He has repeatedly tried to bully local federal prosecutors into seeking the death penalty." The British journal says Ashcroft's ultra-moralizing seems odd, because: "The country is still basically split down the middle politically, and this political divide reflects a deeper division about values. When it comes to matters such as God and sex, many of the people who voted for George Bush live in a different moral universe from Al Gore's supporters.... "As an evangelical who refrains from smoking, drinking, dancing and looking at nude statues, Mr. Ashcroft represents a minority in his own party, let alone the country. He has no chance of winning the culture wars; the forces arrayed against him, from the media to the universities, are too vast." Hellfire has been a driving force throughout the entire history of America, and it's still flaming in Washington. Social tides are nearly impossible to predict, so we can't guess whether the Ashcroft mentality will boom or wither. But watching the moral tug-of-war can be a fascinating spectator sport. - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens