The different concepts of purity today

Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist who has been extremely helpful in explaining why people think about right and wrong in the way they do.

One particularly useful insight of his was to point out that those who leaned to the liberal left tended to decide that things were morally wrong if they harmed people; conservative people would agree, but also tended to have a whole extra moral category – purity.

So, for conservatives, acts that did not seem to harm anyone could still be immoral; but liberals were more likely to see harm as the only moral category that mattered. That is why conservatives cared more about such things as sexual purity and the sanctity of marriage, whereas liberals would not consider a sexual act outside marriage as immoral, as long as it was consensual and didn’t harm anyone else.

New research has questioned this conclusion, by seeking ways in which liberals might be concerned about purity. When it comes to nature, it seems, liberals have just as strong a concept of purity as any conservative – so when a mountaineer drilled permanent bolts into a mountain, this was met with outrage, as violating the purity of the mountain wilderness.

So both conservatives and liberals have a moral category of purity, but there are different objects in those categories. Liberals feel a sense of outrage about the desecration of a mountain; conservatives are concerned about the moral violation of marriage.

'...secular liberals are coming to be just as concerned about morality as...Christians ever were.'

In many ways, it seems that secular liberals are coming to be just as concerned about morality as political conservatives or Christians ever were. Kevin Spacey won the Oscar for his role in the movie American Beauty when it was released some decades ago, in which he portrayed a middle-aged man fantasising about a teenage girl. Yet commentators have argued that this would never happen these days, after Me Too; the character would be seen as so disgusting that the Academy would not dare make the award. That may well be true, and it shows a change in liberal moral attitudes. I can remember, in the 1990s, having classroom discussions at university about Christians who protested movies on the grounds that they were immoral, or blasphemous. Secular students tended to be scathing of such an attitude; to object to a movie on moral grounds was considered ridiculous, puritanical, something no intelligent or cultured person would do. Now, I think, it’s different. I think you do see moral decisions on both left and right that use the same categories.

Yet we put different things in those categories. Christians may well care about a mountain, but would probably not rank it on the same moral level as sexual purity. That is because the Bible makes it clear what matters most. Marriage matters; and while mountains do too, they are not on the same level of significance. Augustine talked about loving created things as they are ordered by God; so it is right to consider people and their relationships as more important than a mountain.

The secular, liberal, Western world we inhabit is coming to be just as moral as any conservative society has ever been – indeed, in many ways just as self-righteously moral as any caricature of Victorians or Puritans – but it is moral about different things. Human beings are moral creatures, we were created that way, so it is not surprising to find that humans have moral concerns. But we are not free to invent our own morality. It is defined by God, and He is the one who gets to tell us what is right and what is wrong.

Yet it is important that we understand why it is we disagree, and what drives people. If this research helps us connect and have conversations about how we come to our moral conclusions, that’s a great first step.