You may have seen the concept of “vertical morality” popping up more and more in conversations about religion and politics. It is meant to explain why right-wing Christians identify as “real” Christians even though their beliefs, actions and attitudes often seem to openly and dramatically conflict with the ethical, humane and peaceful message of Jesus in the Gospels.
While this might be a satisfying theory to many of us on the left, it may not quite fit and there might be an even better explanation. Indeed, for the sake of effective dialogue, it is vitally important for us to understand why ultra conservatives often view themselves as contemporary disciples of a poor carpenter’s son who showed great empathy and concern for the types of folks conservatives often delight in vilifying.
Indeed, instead of portraying ultra conservative believers as passive recipients of authoritarian dogma, from the top down, it might better be argued that their moral convictions stem from deeply rooted racial, cultural and economic intuitions, and it is these values which influence and alter their perception on Christian theology, and make them believe Jesus is on their side.
I am also concerned that “vertical morality” works to establish an ideological “other” more than to illuminate the complexities and causes of human belief systems. The use of the term, in fact, can become a framework that tends to divide people into moral hierarchies and we do not have to do this in order to truly understand the phenomenon of right-wing Christianity or religious belief in general.
Adorno Rehashed?
Vertical morality seems partially to be a repackaging of Theodor Adorno’s postwar study The Authoritarian Personality (1950). This work sought to explain how fascism could take root in ordinary minds and how obedience, rigidity and submission to authority could become enduring psychological traits.
In vertical morality, moral right and wrong are determined by obedience to a higher authority (God) instead of by how one should treat other people. Morality becomes “vertical” because it flows from a divine source down to individuals. Righteousness is measured by loyalty and obedience to God. This contrasts with horizontal morality, which emphasizes the need to understand how unjust circumstances can influence behavior and to treat others well, e.g. loving your neighbor, caring for the poor and promoting social justice and equality of opportunity.
“Vertical morality” borrows Adorno’s core assumption: that hierarchical, obedience-centered morality comes from a type of personality structure and leads to authoritarian politics. The difference is that it’s dressed up for a 21st-century audience, with less Freudian jargon, more cultural framing and often a moral undertone. It just doesn’t perfectly explain why these folks believe their lives correspond to the true Christian message when, obviously, their actions often bear little resemblance to it.
Acquiescence or Projection?
Are right-wing Christians more predisposed to take orders from authority figures? I see no empirical, social science evidence to convince me of this and lots of circumstantial evidence to dissuade me.
Conservatives consistently argue for diminishing the role of government so that individuals and businesses can operate with less oversight and instruction. During the pandemic, they refused to wear masks, rejected vaccines and resisted the shutdown of cities and businesses. Whatever else that was, it wasn’t acquiescent behavior.
The person who becomes a right-wing Christian may start with a set of moral intuitions about the world based on their entitled place in it and threats to their privilege. Status threat theory suggests that individuals who perceive their social group (e.g., white Christians) as losing cultural dominance may adopt more conservative views. This is especially evident in the rise of white Christian nationalism, which links religious identity with political power and cultural preservation.
They believe traditional gender roles are morally correct and under threat. Government programs, especially welfare, public healthcare and environmental regulations are excessive. Individuals should be self-reliant and government aid creates dependency and undermines personal responsibility.
They believe that national identity must be protected from cultural dilution. Immigration, multiculturalism and globalism are seen as threats to this identity, leading to calls for stricter borders and cultural assimilation.
To them, crime is a moral failing, not a systemic issue. Rather than seeing crime as a result of poverty, inequality or lack of opportunity, this view frames it as a consequence of bad character or moral decay. Harsh punishments, “law and order” policies, and support for police and military authority are embraced. Research shows that white evangelicals in the U.S. have increasingly supported political movements that promise to restore traditional values and resist pluralism, especially around race, gender, and sexuality.
These are moral intuitions rooted in a particular (limited) experience and vision of order, responsibility and justice. Once these moral intuitions are in place, the leap to God becomes inevitable. They think: If God is good, then God must surely share our values, because we are obviously good. God must love law-abiding White citizens like us who want to buy houses and raise kids and God must hate criminals and want to see them executed. God wants taxes low. God wants us to burn more coal.
The moral logic flows upward, from the believer to the divine. I don’t see a downward flow from authority figure to the masses. I see a coalesced vision of a largely racially homogenous group that a self-serving demagogue with strong authoritarian tendencies appealed to, harnessed and used to his own benefit.
The key to all of this is a concept Dietrich Bonhoeffer coined: “cheap grace”. Many conservative leaders come from privileged, safe, comfortable backgrounds and see threats all around them. They harshly judge people who have had, perhaps, more difficult and challenging lives.
They have a deep conviction that their moral vision, born of ease and privilege, also happens to be God’s vision; it would be absurd, they think, for a good God to disagree with them. In short, their image of God becomes a projection of their moral order, an endorsement of what they have already decided to value and not orders to be followed from above.
This is not obedience. It’s projection. Right-wing Christians are often addressing ethical problems over which Jesus explicitly said nothing. This allows their moral projections to work. In their projection, Jesus becomes a suburban White guy with a gas-guzzling car with every privilege at his behest, upholding a value system meant to protect every one of his privileges and harboring condemnation for anyone different.
A conservative commentator once said, “We just want to buy houses and raise kids.” What he failed to say was, “…in segregated, gated communities with people who look and sound exactly like us.” It’s not about submission to scripture or authority; it’s about preserving a desired way of life.
They force their values onto poor Jesus and He unwittingly becomes the patron saint of White, middle-class stability, law and order, and parental discipline, not because the Bible demands it, but because the believer does. At the core of the right-wing Christian’s belief system is a deep belief in the rightness of their vision and the deeper belief that a good God would surely have to agree with them.
Projection Crosses the Aisle
But, here’s the kicker. For all I know, I, as a natural born liberal, from a family of Democrats, a family of union supporters, from a Democratic city, may be projecting my beliefs onto Jesus and God as well. Many liberal Christians grew up in liberal Christian traditions. Perhaps it is not just conservatives who are projecting their belief systems onto God for reinforcement.
When we project our values onto a divine figure and feel affirmed, dopamine may reinforce that projection as “truth.” Growing up in a particular tradition (liberal or conservative) also creates a feedback loop. Dopamine rewards alignment with group norms, making it harder to distinguish personal conviction from inherited belief. Are we all, liberal and conservative, discovering God, or constructing God through the lens of our political environment and neurochemistry?
I would like to believe I have been trying to understand the Gospels, using the anecdotes and symbols to challenge myself to rise to a more humane behavior. Yet, maybe I was born into a social and educational context where my values developed to align with the articulated values of the Gospels, through no major effort of my own. In terms stated by Rawls, maybe I am more lucky than good.
In any case, the concept of vertical morality is not the most parsimonious explanation in light of the fact that people are projecting and not taking orders. It doesn’t capture the agency of the believer. It doesn’t explain how moral instincts can shape theology, rather than the other way around.
And most importantly, it doesn’t foster understanding. It fosters “us versus them” contempt which we should be attempting to understand in ourselves and overcome. This contempt is killing us. This type of demonization, from both sides, is killing us. We are gravitating more and more into open hostility through a lack of understanding.
Patience
What we seem to need is patience with each other: the ability to begin to look at our religious beliefs and try to determine which we actually chose based on an engagement with religious authority and how much we expected our religion to conform to our already established social beliefs. We need to accept and understand that people often believe stuff because of many social and economic and even racial factors and that getting angry at someone because of what they believe is putting out a fire with gasoline.
If we want to understand the moral universe of right-wing Christianity, we need to abandon the ladder. This doesn’t mean stop protesting. But, we also need to stop measuring people by how “high” or “low” they are on some imagined scale of enlightenment (where we just happen, imagine that, to be at the top). We need to control our anger and deal with any sense of frustration with others better. Hatred and contempt has just not been working.
Only light dispels darkness. We need to smile more and to explain better, perhaps. Let’s talk about immigration and Medicare and justice and poverty and inequality as human beings engaging each other with respect, not as combatants trying to win a debate. I honestly do not think that conservatives even understand what liberals want any more than we know what they want. What if we are both right and both wrong at the same time?
I tend to believe that it is sweetness and not forcefulness that may beneficially influence those we feel are causing harm with their beliefs and attitudes. Maybe we need to think in terms of planting seeds and not winning battles. Maybe we should recall and celebrate MLK Jr’s belief that it is only light that dispels darkness.
We certainly need to find ways to resist aggressive argumentation and to go beyond our initial emotional responses to ideas and people we don’t like. We have to find a more humane way to respond to opposing ideas and beliefs, even if “they” won’t. Our reflexive responses reinforce attitudes in us that we find problematic in “them”. We may feel self-righteous, but perhaps we have failed to engage other human beings on a meaningful level.
We need to ask: What do they fear? What do they value? What kind of world are they trying to build and why? What do they possibly misunderstand? How can we engage them in a kind, non-threatening and meaningful manner? How can we co-exist without hatred influencing our interactions? It is time to rise above our hate and see humanity, even in those we feel predisposed to condemn.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
