The Latest Casualty in the U.S. Cultural War
Since the November 2019 election, I have tried to understand how Virginia, the place that I have called home for the past 50 years, has become politically, culturally, and economically unrecognizable to me. How have the conservative principles and values that have defined the Commonwealth since its inception in 1776 become virtually extinct? In my quest to find an explanation for this phenomenon, I came to the realization that Virginia is the latest victim in a complex cultural war that has just shifted into high gear after plaguing the United States since the 1960s.
The broad points of conflict in this war are ancient, and they involve all the factors that have engaged politicians since the beginning of time. Conservatives are right when they contend that “values,” both religious and secular, are a dominant issue in this war. Liberals are equally correct when they assert that the conflict is about fairness and justice. Money also is crucial to the conflict – how much and from whom should the government collect? More importantly, how should these funds be spent?
The difference today is that the parameters of the debate have broadened significantly. Past debates over these issues have taken place largely on the periphery. Unlike Europe, America has never had a significant socialist, communist, or fascist party. Typically, U.S. political parties fight over which one best represents the center.
Certain truths have been held to be self-evident by virtually all political factions, and these include the fact that Judeo-Christian doctrine provides the foundation for America’s moral beliefs, that rights are accompanied by obligations, that individual initiative is justly honored and rewarded, that sloth is reprehensible, and that individuals are responsible for their own actions. Today, however, a growing number of liberal Americans vehemently argues via the political process that a good many of these “truths” are not at all self-evident; that many in fact are not only irrelevant to American society today, but that they are actually “immoral.”
Until quite recently, political debates that involved moral questions almost always concerned character issues like honesty and fidelity. Today, both direct and strongly implied charges of moral turpitude fill the air around political debates over such conventional, secular issues as fiscal and monetary policy, entitlement spending, and the regulation of business.
Complicating this situation is the fact that the word “morality,” as used in these debates, often bears no relationship to Judeo-Christian teaching. Instead, morality means whatever the speaker chooses. At the heart of this individually defined “new morality,” is the charge by a growing number of folks on the Left that Christianity itself is “immoral” because of doctrine regarding issues such as homosexuality, abortion, the role of women in society, sexual relations out of wedlock, and contraception. And, here, my friends, lies the crux of the problem. This cultural warfare is directly calling into question the moral basis for the single most important factor in the remarkable success of American enterprise since the first settlers landed in the New World. I am speaking here of what has become known as the “Protestant work ethic.” The importance of this to the U.S. business community cannot be exaggerated. So, let me dwell on it for just a minute.
The seminal work on this subject is a book called The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), by Max Weber. His thesis includes the observation that the United States has a distinctly different cultural attitude toward work and achievement than other countries because the nation was settled, and its early culture developed, by European protestants. According to Weber, Martin Luther was the first person to identify in the Bible the concept of a “calling,” a belief that the “fulfillment of worldly duties is under all circumstances the only way to live acceptably to God.” Weber claims this “moral justification of worldly activity was one of the most important results of the Reformation.” He notes that it contrasts starkly with the Catholic view that such activity was a natural condition of life, and thus morally neutral, like eating and drinking.
Weber states that Luther did not put too fine a point on this theory. Instead, that was left to Calvin, who made it one of the central themes of his religious teachings. Calvinism, of course, was the foundation for Puritanism, which lies at the heart of American culture. Weber notes that strict religious adherence to this dogma did not last long. But he does point out that the concept was quickly secularized and became the foundation for an expansion of free market capitalism the likes of which the world had never seen.
This explains the so-called Protestant work ethic in America, which was quickly secularized by the teachings of, among others, Benjamin Franklin. Via his Poor Richard’s Almanac, Franklin developed and proselytized a unique philosophy that became so much a part of American life that for almost two centuries its tenets were hardly questioned. In sum, the idea that virtue and morality relate to one’s duty in a calling is the distinguishing characteristic of the social ethic of capitalistic culture and is essentially the fundamental basis for it.
The point here is that capitalism, as we know it today, was formed in Western society, within the framework of the Judeo-Christian ethic. This framework helped keep its natural predatory aspects from deteriorating into a totalitarian nightmare, while the system of laws that Americans have always lived by slowly came into being. And it is the combination of these two today, law and a time-honored body of moral and ethical beliefs, that keeps capitalism functioning smoothly in Western societies. One without the other would be disastrous.
I am optimistic that the fundamental precepts of the work ethic, as well as its underlying religious principles, will remain an important part of American and Virginian culture for a very long time. But I think one must acknowledge that a difficult period lies ahead for us as long as the fundamental principles, both religious and secular, are under sustained assault by a group – the Liberal Left -- that claims that higher moral authority is on their side.
