"Defining deviancy down"

Russell Moore:

.... [S]ome of the very people who advance the myth of a "Christian America," in which the American founders are retrofitted as conservative evangelicals, now embrace a view that both the orthodox Christians and the deist Unitarians of the founding era would, in full agreement, denounce. From The Federalist Papers to the debates around the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, virtually every Founding Father—even with all their differences on the specifics of federalism—would argue that constitutional procedures and policies alone were not enough to conserve a republic: Moral norms and expectations of some level of personal character were necessary.

Do these norms keep people of bad character from ascending to high office? Not at all. Hypocrites and demagogues have always been with us. What every generation of Americans have recognized until now, though, is that there is a marked difference between some leaders not living up to the character expected of them and leaders operating in a space where there aren’t expectations of personal character. You might hire an accountant to do your taxes, only later to find that he’s a tax fraud and an embezzler. That’s quite different from hiring an open fraud because you’ve concluded that only chumps obey the tax laws. ....

...[W]hat conservatives in general, and Christians in particular, once knew is that what is normalized in a culture becomes an expected part of that culture. Defending a president using his power to have sex with his intern by saying, "Everybody lies about sex" isn’t just a political argument; it changes the way people think about what, in the fullness of time, they should expect for themselves. This is what Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously called "defining deviancy down." ....

What happens long-term with your policies in a post-character culture is important. What happens to your country is even more important. But consider also what happens to you. "If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual," C.S. Lewis wrote. "But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilization, compared with his, is only a moment." .... (more)

Russell Moore, "Why Character Doesn’t Matter Anymore," Christianity Today, March 21, 2024.