John Leo’s Counterpunch Morality

In more than 300 issues of U.S. News & World Report, columnist John Leo has championed moral issues in ways that have resonated with many evangelicals. With his essay "The Leading Cultural Polluter," he sparked an ongoing culture-war discussion by drawing attention to Time Warner's distribution of objectionable rap and rock lyrics. He has also addressed school prayer, teenage sex, assisted suicide, media bias, and partial-birth abortions.
But Leo's most frequent target is the creed of political correctness, championed by those he calls the "cultural elite." He is at his best when pointing out their double standards, including their distrust of religion.

While Leo does not consider himself a Christian believer, he says, "I grew up in the Catholic tradition, and my head is permanently shaped by it. I believe its social principles, and I defend religion against the assaults of a wrong-headed culture."

What would you say is the driving theme in your weekly columns?

I think millions of Americans are in shock and mourning at the cultural breakdown we see all around us. There must be a way to stand up and say, "This is not the way our culture has to go." My message is, "Let's hang in there, let's make our case, and maybe we can turn the culture around."

I think people are hungry for strong analysis to rub up against. They may not agree with me, but they believe I mean what I say. If I say it strongly, they'll say, "Yeah, that's right" or "I think he's full of beans and I'm going to explain why." Either way it makes people think.

You tend to hit the politically correct agenda especially hard.

I think PC is a real threat. There is a silly aspect of pc: "That nude painting is harassing me, so please remove it." But what Americans don't seem to understand is that it is a very broad and serious assault on traditional Western culture. It's an attempt to shake the whole foundation, accusing it of being partial, bigoted, too white, too male, and needing to be replaced. Every aspect of Western culture is under assault now. I hit PC hard because I think it's a very grave crisis.

In a recent column you stated that traditional moral principles have been "systematically drained from American governance in only two generations." What do you mean?

I'm a moralist. It's a dirty word these days, but I approach things in terms of right and wrong, and in terms of norms which I got from my upbringing. In the Catholic tradition, the community is very strong. There are individual rights, too, but there's a feeling that we're all in this together, that we're all children of God, that we're all at some level responsible for one another. But our cultural and media elites believe that all social values are biases that should have no role in government. So all you are really left with is an empty libertarianism of both Left and Right.

The culture has careened away from communal feeling to a view that we're each just 250 million atoms bouncing around looking for advantage. That's not the way a country coheres. The breakdown of schools, the suicide rate, the amazing amount of sheer greed in the culture-all these things have to do with a kind of "me first" individualism.

This also finds expression in advanced capitalism, which tries to shape everybody into an individual consumer in which there are no constraints from federal regulation or moral regulation that would keep you from buying one product after another. It's a two-pronged problem. Without any guidance or revival of community in America, we'll be shaped more and more by self-seeking on the philosophical level and selfishness on the purchasing level.

Where do you see the church in this picture?

I think churches are in a defensive crouch against the power of secular individualism and the agenda of the modern world. The mainline Protestant churches have more or less abandoned Christian orthodoxy and reduced themselves to vaguely religious auxiliaries of the secular Left. The elites in the media and the university world have long since given up religion and are creating a culture where religion is to be forgotten and is not to animate anything. So many of the collisions we have in the culture have to do with the frustration of Christians trying to come to grips with a contemptuous elitist culture that doesn't even entertain the idea of religious values. They undermine without discussion.

But not only do today's elites tune out moral appeals; they disparage the right to make them. When the Catholic cardinals recently spoke out against partial-birth abortion, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is a Catholic, in effect said, "The clerics should not speak." It's one thing to say, "I think the cardinals are wrong," but now the conventional response is that the churches don't even have a right to say anything.

Stephen Carter, the Yale Law School professor, wrote a fine book entitled A Culture of Disbelief. Originally he wanted to give it the title God as a Hobby. That image is what the secular world says to the churches: "Your religion must be private. It's something you do in your spare time. I do woodwork, you go to church." That's a profound misunderstanding of what religion is. The modern world says of religion, "Don't bring it in. Bracket it, keep it out."

When you sit down to write a column, how do you form your argument?

I'll give you an example. The television series NYPD Blue has been under attack by Christians for occasional nudity. But that isn't the biggest problem with the show. This year the violence level went up and the language became really obscene. If you come out and say, "I don't like the language on this show," you seem like a fool. The provocation isn't large enough to justify a full-scale assault.

But you could use NYPD Blue as a case in point for how the envelope is being pushed and how the language on broadcast tv has become very foul. The show even uses the street terms for male and female genitals. Who gave them the right to do that? How dare they talk that way in our living room!

Now, how to respond to this assault? I have to be careful how I make this argument, because they are all ready to call me a Puritan bluenose. We could say, "Just turn off the tv; don't worry about it." This is an individualistic argument: They have a right to sell, and you have a right to buy. But it isn't a communal argument. It's far better to ask, "What is the effect of this language on our children? Are there any social consequences?"

I did that successfully with Time- Warner. If you pin the argument down to one smug company that is publicly identifiable and that has a stockholder meeting coming up, then you can win.

What tactic do you take when addressing the issue of abortion?

In the American tradition, and certainly in the Christian tradition, the individual does not decide life-and-death issues. You don't get to buy your own electric chair, or to start your own wars. Life or death decisions have always been social.

Lincoln didn't say, "Let's make slavery a choice issue. All the people who want to free their slaves can free them and all those who don't can keep them, and then everybody's happy." No, he understood that it was a social decision. Either slaves were entitled to all human rights or they weren't. I feel the same way about abortion. I think it's illogical to say that the fetuses belonging to pro-choice people can be killed and the fetuses belonging to pro-life can't be killed, as if they have different value or no value at all. "Choice" is a consumerist, libertarian word that effectively keeps morality at bay.

What advice would you give Christians who are unhappy with certain tides within American culture?

My advice is to take culture very seriously. The radical individualism and the ferocious assault on authority-indeed, the leveling of all authority-is disastrous. We are accommodating ourselves to more and more stupid and evil things because we have given up or because we haven't been able to push the right buttons to get social change.

There are certainly optimistic signs. A lot of voices are saying things that could fit into any Christian theology. It's a long haul, and there will be many places to fight, but there has to be a broad alliance of people who care about values that are not sustained by the modern secular culture.

Warren Bird is a writer and researcher in Suffern, New York.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Last Updated: October 2, 1996

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