(8 of 9)
In 1960, when John Kennedy was trying to become the first Catholic to win the presidency, many Protestants feared he might be dominated by the church's hierarchy, which had long fought against liberalized divorce laws, against artificial birth control and for censorship of books and movies. Kennedy defused that issue by confronting a group of Texas ministers and convincing them that secular principles would govern his decisions. Since then, of course, many Catholics have adopted far more permissive views. A report last June, commissioned by the Catholic Theological Society, said that just about any form of sex, including both homosexuality and adultery, could be considered acceptable, so long as it is "self-liberating, other-enriching, honest, faithful, socially responsible, life-serving and joyous."
But now a Southern Baptist is in the White House, and it is evangelical Protestants who provide the most militant force for traditional morality. Anita Bryant, for one, frequently cites Scripture to support her antihomosexual campaign. Says her minister, the Rev. William Chapman of Miami's Northwest Baptist Church, with a rich gumbo of metaphors, "We're getting to the scum line in American society. People's lives are coming apart at the seams. People have burnt themselves out chewing on the cob of the liberal. We've listened to the liberal for 15 years, and what has he produced? A life that is full of the barnyard morality. The liberal dream is nothing but a hog trough."
Among more intellectual moralists, such rhetoric is hardly taken seriously. Lewis Smedes, who teaches theology and ethics at the Fuller Theological Seminary in California, is an evangelical who takes a more reasoned but nonetheless critical view of the trend of recent years. Says he: "The new morality is based on personhood and that could open the door to mass egotism. Our moral standards today are less impressed with the morality of the law or our institutions and more impressed with the value of the person. Even religious people are no longer impressed with marriage as an institution. If the union does not contribute to a person's growth, as that person perceives it, then he or she withdraws."
The opposition to hedonism is not limited to conservatives. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, Chicago black-activist leader, says he used to think that sexual morality was a private affair, but then he began to wonder why he saw so few young people engaged in social action. "Were they marching for full employment?" he asks. "Were they marching to rebuild cities? No, the thrust was to lower the drinking age to 18, to legalize marijuana, to engage in sex and accept no responsibility for the baby. [But] one has to have an ethical base for a society. Where the prime force is impulse, there is the death of ethics. America used to have ethical laws based in Jerusalem. Now they are based in Sodom and Gomorrah, and civilizations rooted in Sodom and Gomorrah are destined to collapse."