A lot of us have been nervous since House Republicans elected an obscure congressman from Louisiana, Mike Johnson, to be Speaker – second in line to the presidency, you know. Johnson seems to be a decent enough fellow, in the sense that he’s friendly and seemingly upright in his personal life. And he is deeply religious. And that’s just the thing: He personifies the gap between the rise of moralizing in political rhetoric and the decline of morality in political practice.
Here's the difference between the two: It is moral to defend the rule of law and the precepts of the Constitution, but undermining them while giving lip service to their value is moralizing. It’s the kind of cheap rhetoric that’s endemic these days.
Mike Johnson is, in fact, emblematic of how moralizing has replaced morality in American politics.
Here’s an example: By a wide margin, most Americans agree that everybody in America ought to be able to marry whomever they love — including a person of the same sex or of a different race. That is, without the government telling us that the choice should be its business, not just our own. That’s based on the moral grounds of fairness and equality – which is enshrined in our Constitution. But that moral argument smacks up hard against the moralizing of right-wing politicians – like Speaker Mike Johnson, who wrote that same-sex marriage, in his words, “is the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.” Wow: Gays are going to kill democracy? That’s some hyped vision of gay power, right?
And here’s another example, by way of a question: What moral code honors lying? Yet Speaker Mike Johnson, a crafty lawyer, fashioned a constitutional argument to overturn the election of Joe Biden, backing up Donald Trump’s outrageous claim that the 2020 election was fraudulent. That’s a lie, of course, and everybody knows it, but somehow politicians like Johnson think they should get a pass when they back it up because Trump has lots of followers? What’s the morality in that?
It's not that Americans don’t recognize real morality when they see it. Charity and civility are moral characteristics; so are courage, empathy, fairness, gratitude and kindness. But many players in the political class these days vilify the display of those moral behaviors as woke and weak. There’s a current in politics that values power over integrity, and over the past four decades, it has eroded the traditions that kept our society moving toward more equality and prosperity.
Maybe it’s not coincidental that the timeframe matches the linkage between evangelical Christianity and the Republican party. It was in the late 1970s that a television preacher from Virginia, Jerry Falwell, created what he called the Moral Majority, an amalgam of political action committees that sought to harness Christian conservatives with the Republican Party. Falwell’s initiative, which was picked up and carried forward by countless other religious leaders in the following decades, has been wildly successful: Before the presidency of Ronald Reagan, neither party, Republican or Democrat, could claim to be the favorite of the Christian right; by 2020, eight in 10 white evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump – despite his record of ugly moral failings of the sort that prompted Pope Francis to say that such a man “is not Christian.”
So the moralism that has always characterized Christian fundamentalism has been secularized, to become the preferred weapon of right-wing politicians. Instead of preaching against the devil and the threat of hell, today’s moralists warn of the Democrats and the threat of socialism.
Yet there are moral causes that the moralists will not embrace. The Old Testament suggests that a moral politician would reach out to immigrants and strangers, as Deuteronomy says, and would, in the words of Psalm 82, “uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed.” In the Book of Numbers, the 4th book of the Torah, the righteous are taught, to “not pollute the land in which you live.” So morality in politics, according to America’s Judeo-Christian religious heritage, demands care for immigrants and asylum seekers, as well as steps toward economic equity and action on climate change.
Do you hear any of that in the agenda articulated by Mike Johnson and his moralistic ilk in Congress? Of course not. Do you hear them denouncing Donald Trump, who proclaimed himself “a great moral leader” – his self-description – but who stood up for the torch-bearing white nationalists who massed in Charlottesville in 2017, shouting, “Jews shall not replace us!” Yes, “very fine people,” Trump said. Tolerance for anti-Semites makes any general denunciations of anti-Semitism nothing but cheap moralizing.
True moral leadership begins with a sense of humility that truth surely lies beyond one person’s reckoning. That’s why the moralists are most dangerous: They stand in the way of the sort of realistic understanding of matters that can bring solutions to today’s challenges. We need leaders who embrace true moral behavior and policies that yield moral ends – and that means that we need to turn aside the moralists who ignore that agenda, and whose words and deeds seek to divide us.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.