HELLFIRE

Morals Shaped America

DURING a conversation, an Australian told an American: "We were the lucky
ones. We got the criminals, and you got the Puritans."

This story is passed around as a joke, but it conveys a clear message:
Today's Aussies, descended from England's deported convicts, are a bawdy,
happy-go-lucky, live-and-let-live people - while American society has been
shaped by centuries of moralizing and taboos.

The U.S. pattern is evident in the daily news, as the Bush administration
endlessly tries to halt abortion, limit sex education, block stem cell
research, foster school prayer and impose other moral goals of the
so-called "religious right."

"Morality is central to our politics and attitudes in a way that is not the
case in Europe," wrote "virtues" champion William Bennett - before he was
exposed as a compulsive gambling loser.

America's moral basis is the theme of a new book, Hellfire Nation: The
Politics of Sin in American History, by Brown University scholar James
Morone. It's causing a stir in academia.

"The moral urge which is at the heart of American politics and society" is
a profoundly important force in the nation's identity, Morone contends.
"Moralizing divides Americans into a righteous us and a malevolent them."

He recounts chapter after chapter in which moralizers shaped America's
beliefs, laws and attitudes. For example:

* Colonial Puritans flogged, pilloried and hanged nonconformists such as
Quakers. "The Scarlet Letter" was a badge of shame for loose women. Then
the colony was seized by witch mania.

* Victorian taboos reached a peak in the late 1800s, when Anthony Comstock
enforced laws against "vice" and jailed hundreds of Americans for petty
sins. Margaret Sanger was jailed eight times for advocating birth control.

* Early in the 1900s, hysteria over rumors of "white slavery" impelled
Congress to pass the Mann Act against transporting females across state
lines, and to create the Bureau of Investigation, which later became the FBI.

* The temperance movement, epitomized by saloon-smashing Carry Nation,
pulled America into Prohibition - which became a tumultuous period of
booze-smuggling that created organized crime.

* Opposition to the teaching of scientific evolution flared in the famous
1925 "Scopes Monkey Trial," and remains alive today.

* Currently, a major "sin" issue is whether gays will be accepted fully as
Americans.

"Us, them, and the shifting lines that run between them get drawn, disputed
and dissolved in moral terms," Dr. Morone writes. "For better or worse,
moral conflicts made America."

Reviewing his book, The Washington Post agreed that "righteous zeal has
proven pivotal to the formation of an American identity" to a much greater
degree than in Europe.

In the book, the professor says an opposite religious impulse, the "social
gospel," spurred America's movement against slavery, and later against
racial segregation, and brought "New Deal" and "Great Society" reforms.
However, several critics have noted that those liberal advances arose from
secular forces as much as from religious agitation.

America's "hellfire" momentum today is epitomized by the Bush
administration. The current issue of The Economist says Attorney General
John Ashcroft has "become the country's moralizer-in-chief." It recounts:

"Ashcroft has prosecuted 'medical marijuana' users in California despite a
state initiative legalizing the practice. Has tried numerous ploys to
challenge Oregon's assisted-suicide law, including encouraging the Drug
Enforcement Agency to revoke the licenses of participating doctors.... He
has repeatedly tried to bully local federal prosecutors into seeking the
death penalty."

The British journal says Ashcroft's ultra-moralizing seems odd, because:

"The country is still basically split down the middle politically, and this
political divide reflects a deeper division about values. When it comes to
matters such as God and sex, many of the people who voted for George Bush
live in a different moral universe from Al Gore's supporters....

"As an evangelical who refrains from smoking, drinking, dancing and looking
at nude statues, Mr. Ashcroft represents a minority in his own party, let
alone the country. He has no chance of winning the culture wars; the forces
arrayed against him, from the media to the universities, are too vast."

Hellfire has been a driving force throughout the entire history of America,
and it's still flaming in Washington. Social tides are nearly impossible to
predict, so we can't guess whether the Ashcroft mentality will boom or
wither. But watching the moral tug-of-war can be a fascinating spectator sport.