God Bless America
Talking point
Traditional teaching or contemporary values?
Should the role of religion be to preserve unchanging moral values and traditions? Or should religious people fight for contemporary values such as tolerance and equal rights, even if these contradict traditional teaching on questions such as abortion and homosexuality? Or, indeed, in a democracy should anyone – religious or secular – try to impose their personal beliefs on others?
The issues
This outline of the issues focuses on Christianity in the USA because the debate has been sparked off by Barack Obama’s appeal to evangelical Christians to break with the old guard and take more liberal political stances. However, many of the debates apply equally to other religions and other parts of the world.
- In the USA, evangelical Christians have traditionally been solid Republican supporters, who oppose abortion and gay marriage. They see these two issues as the acid test of their faith.
- Some evangelical Christians are questioning whether concern about these two issues should override others, such as poverty and inequality.
- Many secularists believe that human rights should trump all other moral or political concerns.
- Conservative evangelicals have, for many years, denied that the US government needs to take action on climate change.
- Some Republican Christians are beginning to accept the need for ‘creation care’ but hesitate to use the word ‘environmentalism’ because it has been associated with liberals and secularists.
- Other evangelicals have acknowledged that the ‘left-wing tree huggers’ were right in campaigning for the government to tackle global warming.
- Traditional evangelicals describe their anti-abortion stance as ‘pro-life’ because they want to protect the life of the foetus or unborn child, which they describe as the most vulnerable possible human being.
- Many other evangelical Christians, though, have reinterpreted the term ‘pro-life’ to mean supporting everyone throughout their lives – including the right of women to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy.
- Many religious people, argue that their faith is a personal matter, on which they base their own moral choices, but should not be used politically to tell other people what to do.
Read a summary of Channel 4’s documentary, God Bless America.
What do you think?
Have your say on the Channel 4 Culture Forum.
Follow up these issues in the Find out more section of this website.
