Vice and Virtue: Our Moral Condition

By Martin E. Marty

The following Bicentennial Essay is the fourth in a series that will appear periodically into 1976 and will discuss how we have changed in our 200 years. .

To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career. --George Santayana

In the midst of the War for Independence, the Continental Congress interrupted its routine to deliver an important message to the public. The American people, Congress implored, should beseech God that "vice, prophaneness, extortion, and every evil may be done away ... that we may be a reformed and happy people."

Vice? Extortion? Modern Americans are bound to be startled by such references. We are trained to think of our ancestors as good and godly because they achieved so much. By comparison with the founders, we see ourselves as a sorry lot. In corner taverns and corners of universities, at church or at cocktails, only the economy itself inspires more heated debate and obsessive worry than does the American moral condition.

It is true that from the beginning colonial leaders had hoped that settlers would be both virtuous and religious. Earliest migrants to Virginia may have had commerce chiefly in mind--one cleric called them "miserable covetous men"--but they also tried to "serve and fear God, the Giver of all goodness." New England's mentors wanted to fill the northern colonies with "visible saints." In the middle colonies the founders of Pennsylvania called theirs a "holy experiment."

In fact, during the 1770s saints were scarcely visible and holiness was rare. Some good and heroic activities were performed by frail, errant and often irreligious people. Certainly, multitudes of decent folk led conventionally moral lives. But a second look at the past will be jolting to those who think that sexual waywardness and permissiveness are recent inventions. Public figures could keep mistresses and acknowledge their illegitimate children--as Benjamin Franklin did--without losing their good names or even their reputations as moralists. George Washington had to chase Philadelphia prostitutes from Valley Forge. In New York 500 "ladies of pleasure" kept lodgings in an area called Holy Ground because it was owned by Trinity Church.

Countless glimpses of common people's intimate life have been preserved, the kind that might set tongues to clucking today even in a swinging suburb. In Groton, Mass., one-third of the 200 people who joined the church between 1761 and 1775 confessed to fornication. A small Maryland Episcopal church chastised 13 fornicators or adulterers in a single month. The fact that there were confessions and corrections shows that simple permissiveness did not prevail, but neither did simple virtue.

Gambling was universal, and fighting was taken in stride. Preachers fretted about English-inspired "Foppery, Luxury and Recreation." Gerald Carson, a student of American manners, rightly notes that "a prohibitionist in colonial America would have been considered a lunatic." The alcoholic eye-opener was a morning ritual for some upper-class women. In the presence of the bottle, church people overcame sectarian differences. On the Carolina frontier, Episcopalian Charles Woodmason grumbled that "In this Article both Presbyterians and Episcopalians very charitably agree (viz.) That of Getting Drunk."

Neither the social nor the personal violence of the 1960s was a new feature of American life. Many historians consider the pre-Revolutionary period one of the most violent these shores have seen. Some of the turmoil, necessary for protest, had a point. Much more of it was pointless. Vigilantism, lynching, I cruel and sadistic i punishments were -common on the frontier. Backwoods ruffi-i ans as described in the journal of a Virginia tutor commonly engaged in "Kicking, Scratching, Pinching, Biting, Butting, Tripping, Throttling, Gouging, Cursing, Dismembering." Ratting and cockfighting were common diversions.

White Americans' treatment of nonwhite minorities is often seen as a prime test of morality. Late colonial records show that few whites were ready to apply their new language about equality and rights to American Indians or blacks. In his Massachusetts Election Sermon in 1770, Samuel Cooke therefore complained that "we, the patrons of liberty, have dishonored the Christian name, and degraded human nature nearly to a level with the beasts that perish."

Not all moral people are explicitly religious nor are all religious people moral. But the founding leaders no less than the Puritans, connected vice with sin, virtue with godliness. In his Farewell Address, George Washington said of the tie: "Religion and morality are indispensable supports ... great Pillars of human happiness ... [the] firmest props of the duties of Men & citizens ... And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion."

Surely, then, we would argue, if the behavior of our forefathers was not impeccable, at least they were more religious than we. Not necessarily. For whatever that means, church membership in the 1770s was actually much lower than it is today --only 6% or 8% of the population by most estimates. The religious Great Awakening of the middle third of the century had given way to a big sleep, and pastors looking for Congregationalists or Presbyterians complained that they found only "nothingarians" or "anythingarians." "The Revolutionary era was a period of decline for American Christianity as a whole," writes Yale's religious historian Sydney Ahlstrom. "The churches reached a lower ebb of vitality during the two decades after the end of hostilities than at any other time in the country's religious history." True, some of the old churchly teaching had spilled over into the culture itself; colonial children, for example, received a strongly religious education both in schools and at home. But the old moral codes, grounded in piety, had largely degenerated into routine moralism, and inspired few.

If, then, both behavior and faithfulness left much to be desired, surely the founders' generation had moral absolutes by which to judge themselves and their fellow men? True, to some extent. The nation's shapers possessed as a gift from their own ancestors a sense of a divine moral covenant. Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop called it "a mutuall consent through a specially overruleing providence." Virginia's John Rolfe saw the colonists as "a peculiar people, marked and chosen by the finger of God ..." for their "errand into the wilderness." The covenant helped them measure vice and virtue.

But in Revolutionary times, the moral absolutes had become a lot less absolute. To the original but fading charter between God and man was added a second covenant, one between man and man: "We, the people ..." This second covenant was drafted by a second, extraordinarily articulate set of "founding fathers." These were men who were influenced by the European Enlightenment and who embraced a kind of post-Christian system that still sometimes did acknowledge the Christian God and respected the man Jesus. Thomas Jefferson found various religions "all good enough" because they helped preserve peace and order, but he could also be critical. Benjamin Franklin "respected them all," but he took sides against the more dogmatic and sectarian churches, those that "serv'd principally to divide us, and make us unfriendly to one another."

Gone was the old language of sin among these later founders. Franklin spoke not of sins but, as a publisher would, of "Errata." He grounded virtue in "the Laws of our Nature" and in man's character as "a sociable being." Jefferson believed that "morality, compassion, generosity are innate elements of the human constitution." He and his physician friend Benjamin Rush spoke for those who thought of man as having a moral faculty and of vice as a kind of curable disease. In his view, good habits and moral practice reproduced health and virtue.

Thus it is not possible to say that in practice the people of the 1770s were more virtuous than we. No one knows how to measure morality with precision; historians have no evidence that the human raw material has changed since, say, the Stone Age. It is none the less true that the founding generation had certain values and advantages we lack today.

The enlightened founding fathers were still united in their belief that human beings were accountable in this life or in one to come. The decline of the popular belief in hell, among other things, has done much to weaken this belief today. The founders and shapers developed a process for nurturing moral concern. Perhaps because they had to, they listened to each other. They reasoned and debated. Today banners, bumper stickers and megaphones often supplant argument. "Abortion is murder." "A woman's body is hers to do with what she wants." These are slogans and conclusions, not hypotheses, shouted by sometimes sincere people who live by their own sets of absolutes but who cannot listen to others.

The founders foresaw and feared--but did not have to cope with--metropolis, the breeder of anonymity and anomie (the lack of purpose and values). They had the urgency that comes with vivid and widely shared causes. Military enemies first pushed them together and then, in order to "form a more perfeet Union," they had to summon moral energies for even more demanding tasks. Many decades later, slavery at home and then Nazism abroad occasioned similar summonings. Today, in contrast, frustrations arising from various foreign and domestic setbacks, the failure of some good intentions on New Frontiers and in Great Societies, contribute to skepticism about causes.

Along with their inherited covenant and consensus, the founding fathers also still had access to a more intact sense of tradition and tribe. Through these, moral values and norms are transmitted. Tradition and tribe can burden people, but they can also produce an identity and point of reference. Today mass mobility and mass higher education, the intrusion of public communications, failure of nerve--all conspire against parents who would embody and transmit continuity of values.

Communication breaks down. Recently a kind of group solipsism has emerged, a sense that "our" insights can only be shared and understood by our members, our kind. Unless one is a Pentecostalist, an Orthodox Jew, a woman, an Anglo-Saxon, a black, a yogi, a youth, an "ethnic," one whose consciousness has been shaped in a particular way, he or she remains an idiot, in the original meaning of the word, an ignorant outsider.

In contrast, fusing the first covenant (the biblical) and the second (the Enlightened), early American generations formed a communitas communitatum, a community made up of subcommunities. Within this community they could say, for example, "We hold these truths to be self-evident ..." and thus project some working hypotheses for the good society. Such hypotheses are often overlooked and understressed or do not even seem to be available to many after 200 years.

Citizens today can rattle off long lists of immoralities and immoralists. A committee sponsored by Catholic bishops in 1974 printed a typical roll call of contemporary villains: shoplifters, trashers, blue-collar time-clock cheaters, white-collar expense-account padders, tax evaders, political bribe takers, perjurers, economic exploiters, sexual revolutionists, the maritally unfaithful, pornographers, irresponsible mass communicators and those responsible for violent crime. But a mere listing does not do justice to the sense of disease and malaise that is in our hearts, the disappointment and disgust often felt between generations as moral standards are challenged or forgotten, the bewilderment and despair many feel over their loss.

Scapegoat hunters do not lack prey. They blame clerical advocates of the "new morality" and churches that have lost moral purpose; advocates of relativist philosophies; "anything goes" parents and children on drugs; the Supreme Court for having taken God and prayer out of the schools; the media for portraying and even touting vice and violence; Watergaters for shattering youth's idealism; those responsible for slums, where evil is bred. Fewer prepare themselves for personal ethical rebirth.

The landscape is bleak. But the Bicentennial finds some thoughtful Americans seeking a renewed sense of covenant and virtue, even though the concept embarrasses many. Few speak of moral progress or Utopian hopes in a moment like ours. Yet it is possible that today too little is made of those rare virtues that we do possess. The Catholic bishops' committee that came to scold stayed also to praise. "Many of the new emphases are positive and praiseworthy: sensitivity to the dignity and fundamental equality of all men and women; increased concern for individual self-realization; broadened perception of the moral decisions which must be made concerning participation in warfare; new appreciation of the imperatives of social justice."

Vivid if not yet widely shared causes go neglected but beckon urgently again: hunger, political reform, environmental issues, inequalities and injustices, economic traumas. The "decline of absolutes" itself is often merely the result of pluralism. "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a pluralistic land?" asked Ethicist Paul Ramsey. Pluralism, the sense that "any number can play," whether in religion or ways of life, will not go away. Father John Courtney Murray called it "the human condition." Every day in every way we are aware that "your" and "my" absolutes sometimes clash. Antiabortionists and pro-abortionists are both sincerely set on "their" absolutes. The resultant moral diversity often does but need not lead only to anarchy.

Citizens are facing the moral crisis through many means. These range from attempts to face the drug problem to rehabilitating criminals; from worrying about the family to reforming laws; from devising new ethical systems to listening to the law of God. Many voices are calling for people to stop exaggerating their pluralism. Everyone belongs to overlapping subcommunities, and these share many common concerns for the good. What might be called "conditional absolutes" often appear as bases for deep agreements in the midst of pluralism. They serve as working hypotheses for the common moral life, assumptions that intersect our tribes, churches and individual lives.

As for the churches, the situation on the surface appears to be better than it was two centuries ago or than it is elsewhere now. Measured by Western European standards or by those of almost any moment in the American past except for the 1950s --when a somewhat superficial resurgence occurred--religious organizations are surviving and achieving much. If the mainline Catholic and Protestant churches are in holding patterns or even declining slightly, the more fervent and rigid churches have found fresh followers. New groups that derive from nonbiblical traditions are prospering.

Today's religious renewals often do little more than provide selfish personal kicks and highs. The humbler churches agree with Walt Kelly's Pogo, who sounded like a biblical theologian when he said, "We have faults which we have hardly used yet." Nevertheless, Jews and Christians still see the height of prophetic faith in Micah's command to "do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God." A hundred million American Christians still see God as "the Giver of all goodness," through his gift of grace in Jesus Christ. But Jesus also made an example of the Good Samaritan because of his loving moral conduct. And in a parable, Jesus told followers to find him in the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned--in situations where moral response is called for.

In that spirit, works of love and efforts at virtue still come from church and synagogue. If today there is some backlash against grand-scale attempts by religious leaders to tie sacred texts to particular social policies--as often occurred during the demonstrations and churchly pronouncements in the battle for civil rights and during Viet Nam War dissent--in thousands of local situations religious people are putting their faith to work. In this way, they and their nonreligious allies may be regaining confidence for larger moral ventures by starting close to home, serving the aged, the hooked, the alienated, the lonely. While they might not be satisfied or happy with their overall contributions, I am tempted to turn Pogo around and say of the churches: "They have virtues they haven't even used yet."

Good people, families, humanists, schools, civic institutions, voluntary societies that are untouched by religion are as involved in the search as are those who identify with particular faiths. Many of them have found terms for moral action in their own "colonies" or "tribes," whether these be philosophical and family traditions, racial and ethnic clusters, age and sex groupings, or movements and causes. In recent years moral renewal has occurred more frequently within these colonies and tribes than in their federation, the national community. Voluntary associations, some derived from the churches' "errand of mercy," and some growing out of other roots, have resources. For some, what Robert N. Bellah calls "civil religion," wherein national life is a kind of matrix and repository of values, offers a promise that surpasses its dangers of self-idolization by bringing citizens into a zone of common concern for transcendent justice. How do we improve ourselves? To what do we belong? For what do we hope? How should we behave? How do we bring up children in a permissive age? How could Viet Nam and Watergate have occurred?

In Between Past and Future Hannah Arendt described how the old authority was lost in the modern world; this loss is "tantamount to the loss of the groundwork of the world." Ever since, the world "has begun to shift, to change and transform itself with ever increasing rapidity from one shape into another ... Everything at any moment can become almost anything else." But, while hardly an optimist, she agreed that the loss "does not entail, at least not necessarily, the loss of the human capacity for building, preserving and caring for a world that can survive us and remain a place fit to live in for those who come after us."

To find a new program, to build national community, and to develop some common moral language is not guaranteed to produce good people. Such activities will not eliminate evil, bring about personal moral regeneration, save souls, gladden all sad hearts or bring in the kingdom of God, Utopia or even certainty. They will not remove all citizens' nostalgia for the simpler life, for the less visible and less jarring pluralism of colonial times. But they could contribute to the process by which, after two centuries, Americans could again seek to be "a reformed and happy people." For the moment, though modern Americans may use less quaint terms, they are so keenly aware of their "vice, prophaneness, extortion" that they tend to defer their dreams and deny their promise.

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