Individualism, Greed, and the Christian Right (Book Notes: The Cheating Culture)

Perhaps the most important catch-phrase of the Christian Right is 'family values' and a significant amount of their political, social, and cultural agenda is predicated on the defense of 'family values.' One of the problems with this is that the Christian Right has a very narrow conception of what qualifies as a threat to 'family values.' It's almost all about sex, never money or materialism.

In The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, David Callahan writes:

Neoconservatives and the Christian right teamed up to mount sweeping attacks in the 1980s on those aspects of individualism that clashed with family values, mounting a cultural war against sexual promiscuity, drug use, feminism, homosexuality, and artists like Robert Mapplethorpe. Conservatives had little to say — then or now — about the moral downsides of the money culture, such as greed, cheating, materialism, envy, and the ways in which careerism elbowed aside family and community. For all their invocations of God, it seemed that the right’s moral missionaries had only read every other page of the Bible — ignoring the incessant warnings in both testaments about the evils of becoming obsessed with riches and growing callous toward the less fortunate.

From the early ‘80s on, the individualism spawned by the ‘60s evolved in a deeply lopsided way. Conservatives championed those individual freedoms associated with the free market, while deriding the hedonism associated with the counterculture. It became not all right in our society to express yourself by altering your consciousness with drugs or getting naked with strangers. But it was all right — admired, in fact — to express yourself with a Rolex, a Porsche, or a pedantic mastery of French wines.

I’m not going to argue that feminism, homosexuality, or Robert Mapplethorpe aren’t threats to family values — I don’t believe that they are, but my disagreement with the Christian Right on these points isn’t relevant to the question we need to address here. The question is: why doesn’t the Christian Right give a similar amount of time to addressing how cheating, materialism, envy, careerism, and greed can be harmful to families, family values, and the lives of the average person?

I don’t think that it can be argued that these things aren’t any sort of threat at all — one might dispute just how much of a threat this or that issue is, but I don’t think that the complete absence of any threat is a plausible position to adopt. It definitely can’t be argued that there is no precedent or basis for criticism of such things in either Christian tradition or Christian scripture. On the contrary, there may be more in tradition and scripture dealing with greed, pride, and money than with sexuality.

So this isn’t an argument that the Christian Right should be criticizing cheating and materialism instead of or even more than adultery and homosexuality. I personally think that this would make more sense, but I don’t need to make that argument — I merely need to point out that they aren’t criticizing the former anywhere close to the latter (and sometimes not at all) in order to say that there is something wrong and something that requires an explanation.

What might the explanation be? Is it the case that the Christian Right has absorbed so much from American culture that it has abandoned basic principles which have been important to Christianity for centuries? Is it the case that the Christian Right’s involvement with the Republican Party prevents it from seriously challenging the interests and values of big business? Perhaps it’s something else — or all of the above. I don’t know, but it’s a question that’s definitely worth exploring.

 

Quick Poll: Is the Christian Right ignoring important Christian values by ignoring problems connected to greed, materialism, and poverty?

1. Definitely - there are reasons why those issues were emphasized in the past.
2. Perhaps a little, but they aren't as important as gay marriage and pornography.
3. No, it's more important to focus on the harms caused by homosexuality than poverty.
4. I don't know.
5. I don't care.

Click an option to vote, or View Current Poll Results

 

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