The eCrozier

“The idea of reading the Gospels and keeping Jesus’ commandments as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective “Christian.” – Wendell Berry

I wholeheartedly agree with Berry’s assessment. We’re all guilty of the sin of baptizing what we say or do as “Christian” in order to underwrite what we see as righteous. We come by this sin honestly. We’ve been schooled in the celebration of the self all our lives. So, it makes sense we’d understand our point of view as righteous in contrast to those who understand things differently. After all, the great American poem is Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the great American essay is Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” the great American novel is Melville’s Moby-Dick, all of which insist on the self. Can there be any doubt that we’d see ourselves as righteous, while those who disagree with us are wrong?

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots. The riots were fueled by a “not guilty” verdict for four police officers who, a year before, had nearly beaten to death one Rodney King. King became famous for asking during the riots: “Can we all get along?” We all saw the videotape. It was detestable behavior by the police, by my lights. But 20 years later, other people seeing the same videotape and recalling the same set of facts, arrive at a different conclusion. They conclude the police’s behavior was justified, even though they had compassion for Mr. King. How can this be? How can two groups view the same incident and set of facts and arrive at opposite conclusions?

Jonathan Haidt, in his new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, addresses this and related issues. Haidt, a professor of Moral Psychology at the University of Virginia, takes the reader “on a tour of human nature and history from the perspective of moral psychology.” One aspect of his research I found revelatory. When his researchers asked people about their moral foundations, they ranked their responses into five areas: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. They then asked the interviewees how they described their political or religious convictions: Very Liberal, Liberal, Moderate, Conservative, Very Conservative.

The results clarify the disagreement between liberals and conservatives. Self-described liberals valued Care and Fairness more than the other three moral foundations. Self-described conservatives, however, endorsed all of the moral foundations about equally. These results show that people who disagree across a spectrum should be careful not to classify those who disagree with them as “immoral,” which often occurs in our culture wars. What may be happening is this: People are putting a higher value on certain moral beliefs than others. This helps explain why two people can reflect on what happened to Rodney King and arrive at a different moral conclusion. Rather than engaging in the current cultural blood sport of demonizing people who disagree with us, we might be able to go deeper into a conversation about moral foundations and recognize the other person’s deeply held, commendable, and good moral convictions.

+Scott