Religious Activists and Scholars on "Moral Values"
As you expand your coverage of America's "moral values," you may wish to speak with religion scholars and those active in religion and public policy to get a more accurate and informed post-election analysis of "moral values and American society." Why has the discussion focused almost exclusively on evangelicals, Christian conservatives and Catholics? Why have poverty, the environment and issues of equity been excised in this public discourse? What can women, immigrants and sexual rights advocates add to the discussion?
The experts below—including Diana Eck, Kim Bobo, and Manuel Vasquez—are all immediately available for commentary. Sample quotes follow:
Diana
Eck, author, A New Religious America: How a Christian Country
Became the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation:
"The Evangelicals need to be tempered
by the recognition that this is a critical moment in Constitutional democracy
for a multi-faith country. This is not a Christian nation, but one in
which people of all faiths have a stake. This tendency to say that one
party underlined moral values and the other didn't is wrong. The Democratic
platform is a moral platform: health care for children, equity, the alleviation
of poverty and rising debt. What we have is an issue of competing moral
vision."
Kim
Bobo, Interfaith Worker Justice:
"Clearly poverty and economic disparity
are issues of moral value that have concern across the broad religious
spectrum. That Florida and Nevada both passed ballot initiatives raising
the minimum wage prove that things aren't right for working people - and
that voters in both red and blue states believe there needs to be change."
Rev.
Clare Butterfield, Faith In Place:
"The conversation has been focused on
private, not public values. But religion has at least as much to say about
how we conduct ourselves in public and as a community. Caring for the
environment is one example of a public religious value. It's about taking
what we must to live, and no more - recognizing that our lives are conducted
at some cost and being mindful to keep that ecological cost as low as
possible so that others can also live."
Chicago Sun-Times, November 24, 2004 Op-ed
"Religious
left needn't be ashamed to speak up"
Manuel
Vasquez, University of Florida:
"It's dangerous when the message of families
and values becomes dogmatic and mixed up with uncritical patriotism. When
there's only one way of understanding virtue, we run the risk of falling
into idolatry, worshipping a human reality as if it were the divinity
itself. And idolatry leads to a lack of hospitality, to increased intolerance
of immigrants, gays or minorities. The considerable number of people for
whom the economy and the war in Iraq were important in casting their vote
also made crucial value judgments of what makes American society good,
just, and democratic—that is, open to diversity and the right to
dissent."
© 2002–2005 Douglas Gould & Co., Inc.