The Injustice of Nonjudgmentalism

Rusty Reno (Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society) summarizes the findings of Charles Murray’s 2013 Coming Apart. Murray compares two statistical cohorts – an upper class one that he labels Belmont and a working class cohort called Fishtown. He finds a growing gap not only in income but in lifestyle, especially with regard to marriage. Belmont residents may talk nostalgically about the 60s, but Fishtown actually lives the revolution, and is surrounded by the debris of broken marriages and illegitimate to prove it.

Murray discovered a religious divergence between the two groups. Reno writes: “Close to 40 percent of prime-age males in Fishtown say they attend church regularly, while in Belmont the figure is 55 percent. This is the reverse of conventional wisdom. The media tend to portray religious belief in decline among elites while remaining strong among less educated, poorer people. That may have been true a generation ago, but the opposite is the case today. Declining religiosity has accelerated among the less educated, while the percentage o religious believers with college degrees has actually increased since the 1990s. There’s not just an income gap in America, there’s a God gap” (48).

Reno argues that the fraying of Fishtown’s moral and spiritual fabric enacts the bohemian ideas of Belmont, ideas that Belmont won’t actually put into practice. At the heart of this is relativism, or what Reno prefers to call nonjudgmentalism. It’s an insidious corrosive of moral and social life: “Nonjudgmentalism breeds an inequality more profound and consequential than a growing divergence of income, splitting society into two realms, the functional and the dysfunctional. In the former, governed by discipline and decency, basic social institutions such as marriage thrive, while in the latter the conditions for dignifies lives are undermined. Our ongoing insistence on nonjudgmentalism – in spite of the obvious harm it does to the poor and vulnerable – reveals the heartless underside of American society. Even as globalization is bestowing decided economic advantages on Belmont, that same ruling class promotes a public culture that provides its members with moral advantages as well, very much at the expense of the weak” (54). Our refusal to make judgments, especially about sex, destroys forms of social discipline and socialization, and it amounts, Reno says, “to a new kind of class war” (59).

Gay marriage exemplifies the effects. It is a perfect expression of American freedom, a “perfect symbol” of freedom’s triumph over the tired conventions of the past. But it means that marriage, “a once authoritative restricted code” with specific roles and demands has become “utterly manipulable”: “Marriage has become another plastic, open-ended option for the upper class.” Belmont will survive, absorbing “the new freedom of men to marry men and women to marry women without much trouble.” But in Fishtown, gay marriage will play out as another blow at the already frail institution of marriage: “Gay marriage bids fair to be yet another moral luxury for the rich that will be paid for by the poor” (62).