c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ It has the tone of a young boy threatening to take his ball and bat and go home because the game isn’t turning out the way he’d like it to.

That would be conservative Christian political operative Paul Weyrich’s bitter complaint that President Clinton’s acquittal on impeachment charges of perjury and obstruction of justice symbolizes a collapse of American culture and morality. That conclusion forces some conservative Christians to question whether they are in the moral majority and wonder if they’d be better off retreating from the political arena.

“Politics itself has failed,” Weyrich wrote in a letter posted on the Web site of his Free Congress Foundation. “And politics has failed because of the collapse of the culture. The culture we are living in becomes an ever-wider sewer.”

Cultural collapse was also on the mind of Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., Clinton’s white-maned and avuncular accuser, as he closed the House managers’ case against the president: “I wonder if after this culture war is over … an America will survive that’s worth fighting to defend.”

Throughout the sordid spectacle of Clinton’s impeachment, conservative Republicans sounded dire warnings about the end of the traditional way of life, a continued culture war and the collapse of morality. Their rhetoric painted a picture of a two-dimensional struggle between those who follow the strict, God-fearing moral code they champion and those who don’t, usually portrayed as a bunch of godless and amoral hedonists, with Clinton serving as Exhibit A.

Wrong, say at least two academics who study American culture and moral values _ Don Beck, director of the National Values Center of Denton, Texas, and Paul H. Ray, a San Francisco anthropologist and sociologist who heads up American LIVES Inc., a market research and opinion polling firm that specializes in studying the effects of moral values on consumer choices.

Although they disagree on some fine points, both men say a new set of cultural values is beginning to emerge, challenging the two-dimensional mind-set of Christian conservatives.

Ray, for example, offers a contrarian argument to Hyde and Weyrich. He sees the emergence of a third world of meaning and values, a rising cultural dimension that appeals to nearly one-fourth of American adults, or about 45 million people.

Call them the Cultural Creatives, says Ray. They don’t adhere to the traditional values of what Ray calls Heartlanders, who represent about 29 percent of America, or about 56 million adults. Nor are they the rational, materialistic, bottom-line and ultra-pragmatic Moderns, a cultural wave that arose in the 1920s and now makes up 47 percent of America, or about 88 million adults.

Cultural Creatives are people with a strong spiritual and moral core, says Ray, but one based on the social movements that have emerged in the past 30 years _ from the civil rights movement to feminism to the environmental movement _ instead of the God and country of the Heartlanders or the science and Dow Jones of the Moderns.

Six out of 10 Cultural Creatives are women; many live on the West Coast; more of them are college-educated than Heartlanders or Moderns; most are in the upper-middle class. They are strongly focused on the environment and the rebuilding of neighborhoods and communities; they love foreigners and the exotic; they are concerned about violence toward women and children and the development of caring relationships; they are forging a new “sense of the sacred” that combines personal growth, service to others and spirituality; they have a social conscience and a guarded optimism about society’s prospects.

Don’t dismiss them as wind-chime-loving New Agers, said Ray. Stitched together, these Cultural Creatives form a force that stands alongside the Heartlanders and the Moderns, flying a new set of moral standards. Rather than a collapse of morality, Ray sees the rise of multiple sets of values, each with a strong moral component.

“What I contend, exactly contrary to Hyde and Weyrich, is that our moral standards are going up,” said Ray, who studied at both Yale University and the University of Michigan. “Americans are getting more moral, not less. … What we’re seeing is that Americans are rising up and educating themselves and adding to their moral repertoire.”

And that’s a threat to Heartlanders like Hyde and Weyrich, who tend to tout their moral views in what academics like to call “triumphalist” tones, an insistence that their cultural values are superior to any others, the truest representation of American culture.

In their long battle to dominate the Republican Party, conservative Christians have insisted on moral absolutes, the black-and-white of right-and-wrong; they have hissed at the gray-toned moral relativism of a favorite bete noire, “secular humanists,” and the if-it-feels-good-do-it credo of the ’60s counterculture.

“We’re talking about moral pluralism here, not moral relativism,” said Ray. “We have more moral values rattling around than at any time in our history. People who want to hold on to the old, narrow ways are going to hate that.”

Not only are Hyde and Weyrich wrong about America’s moral collapse, they are wrong about their values representing the mainstream of American culture, said Ray. Heartlanders have a higher average age than the Moderns and the Cultural Creatives; over the past century, Heartlanders have come to represent a small percentage of the adult population, from 55 percent just after World War II to the current 29 percent figure.

“You’ve got claims from the religious right that they are the mainstream of American culture and nothing could be further from the truth,” he said. “They’re the trailing edge and are in decline.”

While the Hyde and Weyrich crowd sounded notes of despair about Clinton’s soaring popularity in the face of being the first American president since Andrew Johnson to be impeached and the seemingly endless cascade of salacious details about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, Ray saw a positive. The gap between Clinton’s boorish behavior and his popularity isn’t a sign of moral decline; instead, says Ray, it is proof that Americans are executing a sophisticated cakewalk between competing value systems, carefully picking and choosing what is important to them and what is not.

But where Ray sees progress and sophistication, other academics see moral confusion and an inability to negotiate the complexities of competing value systems. Confusion and chaos are common telltales of cultural change, said Don Beck, director of the National Values Center, a sociological consulting organization that studies how people’s value systems can contribute to or defuse conflict.

Beck, who worked with the South African government during its transition from apartheid, calls for the development of an “integrated culture,” one that recognizes the strengths and weaknesses of America’s three sets of value systems and is able to synthesize a new working set of values from them.

“I’m trying to get people out of flatlander thinking,” said Beck. “It’s not a question of either/or, it’s what you do to keep the whole system alive, to keep all of the value systems healthy. If any one system dominates the others, it becomes malignant and society will suffer, maybe collapse.”

Think of those Russian dolls, a smaller doll nestled inside a larger doll nestled inside yet a larger doll. Beck said this is how America’s various sets of values relate. At the core are the traditional moral values espoused by Hyde and Weyrich, what Beck calls “the rule of law” and what Ray calls Heartland values. The next doll is where pragmatism and materialism and individual accomplishment rule, said Beck _ Moderns, in Ray’s terminology. The third doll represents values that have emerged over the last 30 years, featuring a focus on human relationships, harmony, sensitivity and creating a sense of community _ what Ray has labeled the Cultural Creatives.

In the 1960s and ’70s, there was a broad attack on traditional moral values and an accompanying backlash, said Beck. What most fail to realize is that those traditional values form a cultural bedrock that is the foundation for the other value systems, he said; if the bedrock is eroded, the other systems fail.

“If we lose that first system, we lose direction, we lose our moral compass and the proper foundations of more complex thinking,” Beck said. “And if we stay in that right/wrong zone, we fragment into holy wars.”

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Beck says there’s a pressing need for a fourth system of values to emerge, one that features the moral spine of traditional American culture, the flexibility and pragmatism of Ray’s Moderns and the emphasis on interpersonal relationships found among the Cultural Creatives.

On the political front, the push for this new set of values can be found in the philosophy of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s “Third Way” or Texas Gov. George Bush’s call for “compassionate conservatism.” Both place a heavy emphasis on personal accountability and a strong moral sense of right and wrong.

“In the place of those traditional values, we put in relativism and doing what feels good and that’s left a huge gap,” said Beck. “We need to go back and rebuild that sense of right and wrong in our churches, in our schools, in athletics. Unless you have people learning how to do right, a system based on doing good will collapse.”

DEA END NESBITT