Timothy Birdnow

Here is a good essay with my own comments at the end:

MICHAEL SMITH

MAR 6

A bar chart showing that In many countries, people see their fellow citizens as morally good

Shortly after I posted the essay on "progressive” Christianity, I saw something that tied into my premise that "progressive” Christians are simply redefining traditional Christian tenets in ways that agree with their political agenda. That "something” was a new Pew survey (released yesterday) that showed the results of respondents in several countries being asked a simple question:

"Are the people in your country morally good or morally bad?”

In nearly every nation surveyed, large majorities said their fellow citizens were good people. They might complain about politicians or corruption, but they still believed the average person around them was fundamentally decent.

Except in the United States.

In America, the survey found that a majority of respondents believed their fellow citizens were morally bad rather than morally good. The most common explanation offered is political polarization and there is certainly some truth to that explanation. Our politics have become increasingly hostile, and the language used to describe opponents often sounds less like disagreement and more like moral condemnation. Political arguments are increasingly framed as battles between good people and bad people, but the deeper problem may not be that Americans have suddenly become less moral than people in other countries. It may be something more basic: Americans increasingly disagree about what morality even means.

Words like "good” and "bad” sound simple, but they are not. Their meaning depends on the moral framework someone is using. For most of American history, that framework was broadly shared. Even people who were not personally religious lived within a culture shaped by religious assumptions about right and wrong. Ideas such as honesty, responsibility, loyalty, charity, and restraint formed a common vocabulary of morality.

Americans argued constantly about policy, but they were generally speaking the same moral language when they did so.

Over the past several decades, that shared framework has weakened. Religious affiliation has declined, church attendance has fallen, and the number of Americans who identify with no religious tradition has grown steadily. As those institutions faded, the common moral vocabulary that accompanied them faded as well.

In its place, several competing moral systems have taken root.

One useful way to think about this divide comes from social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. His Moral Foundations Theory suggests that human beings tend to build their moral judgments on several basic instincts—things like care and harm, fairness, loyalty, respect for authority, and ideas of sanctity or purity. Different groups emphasize those foundations differently, which means they can look at the same event and reach very different moral conclusions.

You can see that dynamic in many of the political disputes that dominate modern headlines. One person may view abortion primarily as an issue of personal liberty, while another sees it as the destruction of innocent human life. One group may interpret immigration enforcement as cruelty, while another sees it as the defense of national sovereignty and the rule of law. One side sees traditional gender norms as oppressive, while another sees their rejection as social instability.

In each case, both sides believe they are defending moral principles. Yet because they are using different definitions of moral good, they inevitably conclude that their opponents are not merely mistaken but immoral and that distinction matters. When people disagree about policy, compromise is possible. When they believe their opponents are morally corrupt, compromise begins to feel like surrender. If the other side is not just wrong but evil, negotiation itself starts to look like betrayal.

Modern media and political culture intensify this dynamic. Disagreements are framed less as debates over policy and more as struggles between virtue and vice. Every controversy becomes evidence of moral failure, and every election is presented as a battle to save the country from the dangerous intentions of the other side. Given those circumstances, it becomes easy to see why Americans might tell pollsters that many of their fellow citizens are bad people. They are not simply describing their neighbors; they are judging the moral framework they believe those neighbors represent.

Ironically, that result does not necessarily mean Americans are less moral than people in other countries. In some ways it may mean the opposite. Americans remain intensely concerned with moral questions and argue about them constantly.

The problem is that we are increasingly arguing from entirely different moral dictionaries.

For most of the nation’s history, a shared framework of moral assumptions allowed people to argue without questioning the basic character of their neighbors. Today, that common framework appears to be fragmenting. People can look at the same events, policies, and cultural changes and reach completely opposite moral conclusions and when a society no longer agrees on what "good” means, it should not be surprising if many citizens begin to believe their neighbors are bad.

I thought it was interesting that Canada, a country that has abortion on demand and euthanasia, ranked highest on the morally good side.

The survey result may not truly measure a collapse in American morality at all, but it may instead reveal something more troubling: a country that no longer shares a common definition of it.

The last time America had a divide of this magnitude, we fount a bloody civil war to resolve it.

Mr. Birdnow responds:

Let us put this in a nutshell shall we? For a hundred years the Progressive Left has been in control of the educational system and has substituted their own atheistic moral code to replace the Judeo-Christian ethics of the past. Now they own the schools and universities, lock, stock, and barrel and there is indeed a competing moral code but it is the work of demonic forces aka the radical Left, and many believe it because it's what has been taught to them.

G.K. Chesterton put it best:

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

And that includes Judaism, which has also been rejected because it wasn't as much fun as neopaganism or outright atheism.

So the Left has tempted Americans with fleshly, worldly pleasures and has made anyone who tells them this will hurt them in the end into bogeymen, bad people who want to steal their enjoyment of life. Abortion is a great example; the best way to not have an abortion is to not get pregnant, and to do THAT the best way is to keep the office closed for business. But if you tell many Americans that they will think ill of you because they WANT to enjoy themselves in this way.

There very much is a moral problem in America, and the rest of the world too. Americans just clung to Christianity longer than Europe or the colonial nations. But how do you reach someone who thinks the only evil is the person who says there is evil? That is where our problem now lies.

Leftism is nothing but a substitute religion for Judeo-Christianity. And like all cheap substitutes it cannot tolerate the original around to show it up. That's all this is.

This reminds me of the Star Wars movie Revenge of the Sith where the newly seduced Anakin Skywalker aka Darth Vader tells Obi-Wan Kenobi "from my point of view it is the Jedi who are evil" even though he knows that not to be true. That's what the leftists who say their conservative fellow Americans are evil are actually doing. 

Posted by: Dana Mathewson at March 10, 2026 10:18 PM (+cB4m)

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at March 11, 2026 06:57 AM (oflqW)

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