Talking about the changing moral mind of social groups and the shifting moral consensus of a society may cause some who hear this theological language to assume that social groups have monolithic social and moral minds. That’s clearly not the case, and is not what the social gospel movement meant in using this concept.The insight that social gospel theology sought to capture in developing the concept of a social mind is that social groups do sometimes generate new perspectives on moral issues previously taken for granted as resolved. And when that happens, when a new consensus develops with sufficient sway to draw in the center of the social group in question (with the all-important assistance of leaders who recognize that social problems commonly involve moral aspects that cannot be ignored if we want to solve those social problems), the new moral consensus of the group is then enshrined in legal changes that create a new moral mind in the practice of the society in question.
The step of legal enshrinement of a new moral consensus does not necessarily mean that all groups within a given society endorse the moral shift that has taken place in their culture. In fact, there remains, in many cases, considerable resistance to any new moral consensus of a society enshrined in laws protecting that consensus. In many cases, groups actively resistant to the changes that have taken place—groups intent on removing the legal protections in place to safeguard a new moral consensus—coalesce around their goal of resistance.
I used race and gender issues as the framework for a reflection about how societies change their moral minds yesterday. To say that our society has changed its moral mind about race and gender does not mean that we have eradicated racism or misogyny. Resistance to racial justice and reconciliation and resistance to women’s rights remains very strong in our culture. And this resistance is often fueled by contemporary manifestations of the same religious viewpoints that initially resisted the enactment of laws to abolish slavery or eradicate segregation, or laws to provide equal rights to women.
The key point to be emphasized here is the point about legal enshrinement of a new moral consensus—of a new moral mind—of a society. When that occurs, the moral mind of the society in question can be said to have shifted decisively. But such legal enshrinement of a new moral consensus does not mean that everyone in the particular society has changed his/her own mind about the morality of the issues under consideration. Much work remains to be done in our own society around issues of race and gender, even after we have made breakthrough shifts in how we perceive those issues, sufficient to generate new legal protections for those affected by racism and misogyny.
As this new year begins, I’m thinking, for instance, of how far we’ve come (and how far we still have to go) in the area of women’s rights. Of women’s freedom and self-determination. Of recognition of women’s full personhood.
My thoughts about these issues today are framed by a post-Christmas conversation with one of my nieces. This is the big-city, glamor-girl niece who has the job of her dreams in New York, a first job right out of college. We are very happy for her. She worked hard to have the right to earn enough money each month to pay, just barely, the horrendous rent for a tiny shoebox apartment in Manhattan. We are proud of what she’s accomplishing.
This is an opportunity not one of us would want to see my niece denied, even as the social pressure for young women to marry and have a family remains strong, and as that pressure predicts that a young woman living on her own and pursuing her dreams will one day wake up feeling unfulfilled, and will realize that she needs a man and a family in order to achieve “true” fulfillment. My niece is creating her new adult life with full awareness of those siren voices which remain so strong in our culture, and which seem particularly strong in many of our churches even today: voices that prophesy doom for women living on their own, paying attention to themselves, seeking self-fulfillment and the right to live dreams. Voices that would never prophesy doom for men (well, straight white men, at least) seeking any of those things.
My niece and I spent the evening of the day after Christmas talking about this. One of her concerns now is a relative of hers who seems (from an outsider’s perspective, at least) to be locking herself into a set of grim options for the future. This relative has a circle of friends in which several of the young women, all at the end of high school, have become pregnant and married.
My niece is concerned about the same thing happening to her relative, given her relationship with a young man who seems to fit well into that circle of teens. As we talked about that, my niece said to me, “I want to say to her, ‘Really? You mean people still do that? Get knocked up at 18 and feel obliged to marry the father? Really? That’s still going on?’"
As my niece talked, I realized that she is baffled that “that’s still going on” because she herself has moved into a different world than the one in which her young relative lives. This is a world from which there is no turning back. It is the world in place now that the women’s right’s movement has opened doors for young women, through which one goes to find a place radically discontinuous from the old place of female proscriptions: a world in which women have a right to choose, to pursue their dreams, to reject societal expectations that imprison women, to ignore moral imperatives based on the idea that biology is destiny, and that the biological destiny of women is to live in a reproductive prison.
At the same time, I realized as we talked, the world in which she lives is not the world taken for granted by her young relative—or by many other people in Western cultures today. And that despite the accomplishments of the women’s movement and the enshrinement in law of protections of women’s rights.
Society has changed its moral mind, in the West at least, about the place of women in the world. But persuasive subcultures within the overall framework of Western culture have not moved in the same direction in which cultural consensus has moved, re: these issues. And considerable reaction to women’s rights still exists, particularly in religious groups, many of which would encourage my niece to return to the world in which her young relative lives—to look for a man to fulfill, support, and control her.
The life my niece is living is one lived against the backdrop of those church-based expectations for women. On one side of her family, only two generations ago, a female ancestor lived precisely the script she now fears small-town church-based society is writing for her young relative.
This ancestor became pregnant several years before she was 18. She hid that fact up to the day on which she disappeared onto her parents’ back porch, delivered her baby by herself, and walked inside with the newborn in her arms, to announce to her mother and step-father what had just happened.
She did the right thing. She did what her town and church expected her to do. She married the father and raised two other children by him. She quickly learned that the young man who had impregnated her was far from perfect—that he drank heavily and could be abusive when drunk.
When the children were approaching high school age, her husband died suddenly in a tragic accident. Left a young widow with three children and few means of support, this remarkable woman went to college and completed not one, but two, masters' degrees in education. With those, she was able to provide for her children in a time and place in which single mothers struggled merely to put food on the table.
My niece knows this story. The woman to whom it happened chose to make it public when my brother and sister-in-law married. I am glad she made that choice, since the story provides one among many lenses through which my niece can now view her life as a young woman in the 21st century, and can consider the options available to her.
To our discredit, though the women in my family were strong-minded and assertive—and though they chose careers for themselves when women were expected to be housewives and mothers—my family would have suppressed such a story. We have no base-born children in our family—not even the ones who, a few generations ago, walked down the streets of my family's small town in their mother’s tow, bearing the name of the male member of our family who fathered them, looking just like him. They didn’t exist. To us, at least.
My niece does not want the fate her ancestor endured to be revisited on her young relative. She wants the passing of generations to mean something different for women—new possibility, if nothing else, for those who want that possibility. She does not want her relative trapped, as so many young women in the church-dominated town in which she lives are trapped, in a world of unhappily married wives who join Facebook groups called 100,000,000 Christians Worship God, or Jesus 2008.
If the relative wants that world, fine. But if not, there should be options for her—options like those my niece has had, options to have a life of her own, and not the life imposed from outside. The precious option to have a self in a world that denies a self to women, or makes women pay an enormous price for seeking themselves.
Not much has changed, one might think, when one hears this story. And yet a tremendous amount has changed, when it comes to women’s rights. Even though the moral mind of society may not have changed everywhere to the same degree, it has changed substantially and decisively enough to provoke a shift in our laws, so that the laws of Western nations now recognize the right of women to the same self-determination men enjoy.
Still, the task of developing a new moral mind in a society is an ongoing task, because the fragile consensus on which new moral minds are based is always tenuous and always subject to attack from groups that have a strong interest in undermining a new moral consensus. The fight to preserve and extend a new moral consensus is an ongoing fight. It requires continued activity on the part of those convinced that the new path a society blazes for itself re: an issue of human rights is worth keeping there, keeping open, keeping accessible.
Because in any society there will always be those who want to close off paths that permit more people more liberties. In any society there will be those who see the liberty of a group previously hedged about with moral and social prohibitions as a threat to morality itself: allow those people—people of color, women, gays—such liberties, and who else will want freedom from oppression? And how to draw moral lines, when we cannot do so across the backs of those whom we have kept in subjugation for that very purpose?
Such battles continue, even in 2009. They continue because the resistance to human rights—to human rights for all—remains strong, even at the very center of many Western cultures. And no leader who leads from the center in Western culture today can afford to ignore that fact, if he or she truly wishes to lead with change in mind.
