I found this essay while researching something else. It makes some very interesting points regarding the breakdown of morals in this country.

Denise Noe
Calling Down The Fifties: The Religious Right As A Cargo Cult
October 25, 2006 at 3:25 pm · Filed under Vox Populi

To sum up the aims of any major social/political movement requires simplification; to summarize those aims without bias is difficult when coming from outside that movement.

It is vital to depict what is generally referred to as either the Religious Right or the Family Values Right, in a disinterested manner if we are to understand its powerful appeal to millions of Americans.

Liberals and feminists (two distinct though often overlapping groups) frequently exaggerate the goals of the American Religious Right. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale was a brilliant novel but the Nation of Gilead is not the country most members of the American Religious Right want to live in. Generally speaking, our Religious Right does not seek to make the United States a Western version of Iran or Afghanistan. They do not want a Christian dictatorship. The Religious Right is, for the most part, anti-racist--rejecting any parallel between racism and sexism. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly, and their followers evince little appetite for enacting the Old Testament punishments of execution against adulteresses or homosexuals.

Roughly speaking, it is fair to say that the American Religious Right wants to outlaw abortion, push gays back into the closet, eliminate welfare (or at least radically decrease it), cut taxes, return to a dominant male breadwinner and submissive female homemaker model for most marriages, and continue building up the Pentagon.

One is hard-pressed to understand these goals by turning to the Bible. While there are Biblical passages that can be interpreted as advocating what we have come to call, however misguidedly, “patriarchy� or more commonly a “man’s world,� crushing a feminist movement which would form some two to five thousand years in the future is not a primary aim of that Book. Abortion gets scant attention. The proper levels of taxation and government spending are not dwelled upon in either the Old or the New Testaments. Though both Testaments contain passages that can be interpreted as condemning male homosexuality, and the New Testament includes one which may rebuke lesbianism as well, this still only partially explains the Right's views on the subject since, as noted, the mainstream groups do not demand a return to the Biblical punishments for other private, consensual sex acts, nor do they wish to impose many other Biblical injunctions (say, that against wearing clothes made out of more than one type of material).

The "anti-government" rhetoric of many on the Right leads up another blind alley for those trying to understand its aspirations. After all, they demand government intervention between a doctor and a woman seeking an abortion. As is true of most on the Left, the Right wants to keep the government spending ever more on the war against recreational drug use.

Where can the model for the Religious Right's agenda be found? The thesis of this essay is that they want to return to the America of the 1950s -- with the vital exception that they do NOT want to revive the racial discrimination prevalent during that period.

The Positives

During the Fifties, much of the United States of America lived under a tacit economic deal that permitted a single breadwinner family to have what was then regarded as a middle-class lifestyle. For the most part, married men worked nine to five; wives took care of the kids.

It was, for many women, a time of relative "liberation." As feminists have rightly pointed out, with the exception of a minority of females in the elite classes, women have always worked -- and always been subservient to men, although the degree that subservience has tended to be exaggerated by many people of varying beliefs.

The difference during the Fifties was that families that were not rich could afford to have a wife who was not economically productive. Thus, American married women as a group were, for the first time in history, granted a certain amount of leisure in compensation for the (often superficial) “submission� which was a given in male/female relationships.

"Leisure" in this case should not be confused with mere idleness. The housewife of the Fifties was often very busy -- and rather independent.

For one thing, the suburbanization of the period meant that the automobile became a mother's tool. Driving a car lost most of the masculine connotation it previously had (and still does possess in some parts of the world; the seemingly most “male supremacist� nation on earth, Saudi Arabia, forbids women to drive), as taxiing the kids to school, dentists, doctors, parties, scout meetings, music practice, and church activities became women's work.

Men - -or at least the majority of white men -- had job security. The G.I. Bill allowed many returning soldiers to go to college and, thus, attain highly skilled professional positions.

The plethora of physical strength-oriented factory jobs meant that men, even without higher education, could "make it" to the extent of supporting their families if they plugged away and played by the rules

The importance of this cannot be overestimated for the Great Depression, which was still fresh in the country's mind, had been a special trauma for the masculine psyche, as masses of American males were unable even to contribute to their family's support. Joseph Pleck, in The Myth of Masculinity, argued that the Depression was "the single greatest crisis in the traditional and institutional basis of the male role, that of family economic provider."

The "living wage" which the vast majority of non-minority men earned meant that they could expect a homemaking wife who allowed them the final word and children who looked up to them as head of the house.

continued

The Negatives

The Fifties were a stifling period for many. There was, of course, the great wrong of racial segregation and discrimination. Gays and lesbians were routinely "discovered" and fired, harassed by the police, and beaten up by thugs while the authorities looked the other way.

Discrimination against women in the workplace was rampant -- and legal. When Betty Friedan wrote about "the problem that had no name" in The Feminine Mystique, she struck a responsive chord with a large group of housewives. Phyllis Schlafly is wrong when she proclaims, as she did in an interview published in McCall’s in 1982, that, "housewives were reasonably content until the libbers came along and told them they weren't." People are not sheep and massive social movements do not arise in a vacuum.

For one thing, the Fifties included a great many women who had received college degrees and, as Sylvia Ann Hewlett observed in “A Lesser Life,� "for the first time in history, educated college women were expected and encouraged to devote their prime years and expend their best energies on housework and motherhood." Thus, underutilization of skills and knowledge, with its inevitable psychological toll of frustration and boredom, was the rule for a large number of females.

Although middle-class and lower-class women were not deprived of "careers" (the men in their strata held only the duller, grittier "jobs"), the Fifties model had deficiencies for them as well. The collapse of the extended family, (which had begun at the turn of the century), coupled with suburbanization meant that, again for the first time in history, a large plurality of American women were deprived of interaction with other adults until a husband returned home for dinner. That husband, while usually not the tyrant of sensational movies, was often tired from the hard work he had done that day, could be like many men not high in verbal skills, and as a result uncommunicative. When the children entered school, a housewife's day could be extremely isolated and, regardless of the reasons, women as a group are may be even LESS suited to solitude than men are -- yet large blocks of time alone (or at least without adult company) were the Fifties feminine lot.

Finally, there is always a distinct problem with depending economically on a spouse (which in those days invariably meant the wife depending on the husband). Family therapist Betty Carter has described it as the Golden Rule, "Whoever has the gold makes the rules." But that problem preceded the Fifties and, despite feminism, still exists in many intact families today, even those in which the wife works both inside and outside the home, since in most heterosexual families the man remains the primary breadwinner.

This point has often been obscured by American feminists because they have often praised paid work per se. In truth, many women find the chores of childcare and housework far more agreeable than, say, waiting on tables or standing behind a lunch counter. The downside of the housewife's position is that not having her own money (from whatever source) leaves her in a precarious position should the marriage turn rocky -- even more precarious than that of similarly situated woman who (reluctantly) works at a dull, fatiguing nine-to-five job.

Why Return?

The Religious Right is not limited to die-hard “male supremacists� and ignorant, masochistic women. There are legitimate reasons why so many Americans sympathize with a movement that promises a return to the social and family paradigms of the Fifties.

Both married women suffering fatigue, anxiety, and stress due to the double burden of paid work and housework and single mothers bearing the entire burden of raising a family alone yearn for a husband/breadwinner who would enable them to stay home or, (if single and taking public assistance), be a "homemaker" rather than a despised "welfare mother." It is not pathological for such women to find subservience (assuming a decent rather than incestuous or otherwise horrible husband) more attractive than poverty and/or nervous exhaustion.

Men who are either unemployed or under-employed may believe that a return to the America of the Fifties would increase their earning power and, thus, remove the insecurity and degradation of their plights. A low-income man who may go to jail because he is behind in his child support payments (no excuses are accepted when a non-custodial parent, male or female, fails to pay child support), a married man who wants to start a family but must delay it because he and his wife are barely making ends meet, a man afraid for his kids because he and his working-outside-the-home wife must leave them in what they both suspect is inferior care, a man who comes home to a wife who is too tired for sex because of her paid job -- all are apt to envy Ward Cleaver and, thus, support a movement which promises to give them the dignity and security of family breadwinner.

African Americans

Religious Right rhetoric has a special appeal to some African-Americans of both sexes. They feel that blacks were, in some sense, cheated of a 1950's. Throughout the Fifties, black women continued to work outside of the home since black men rarely had the "family wage" jobs that permitted them to live in accordance with the Breadwinner-Homemaker model.

When "Negro" male sanitation worker went on strike, they held up picket signs reading "I Am A Man" --not "I Am A Human Being"--and they were implicitly demanding the respected position of family breadwinner that most white men had during the Fifties.

continued

Reasons for the Fifties 'Deal'

The true flaw in the Religious Right's agenda is its confusion of correlation with causation. The Fifties lifestyle was founded on an economic anomaly -- the reasons for which were contrary to the conservative ideal of laissez-faire capitalism.

Prior to WWII, the rising labor movement had engaged in many protests and strikes aimed at radically redistributing wealth -- and this idea was attractive to many Americans during the horror of the Great Depression.

After the war's end, Japan and most of Europe were economically devastated. This allowed American companies and workers to strike an implicit "deal" which was to the good of both. Workers in the primary sectors of the economy (automobiles, steel, aerospace, etc.) were protected by oligopoly arrangements (e.g., steel), which is to say a condition in which sellers are so few that they have great influence over price and other market factors, or government subsidy (e.g., aerospace) from competitive pressure. The protection allowed these industries to extract large rents or returns due to their advantages in production. The dependence of the industries on large cadres of skilled workers plus the pressure of organized labor allowed laborers and middle managers to extract some of these rents for their own benefit.

Thus, these workers -- almost all male and overwhelmingly white -- were able to demand a "living wage," as it was called, i.e., enough to support several people or the number of people that would be in small or medium-sized family.

This situation did not last because Japan and Europe recovered and global competition meant that American workers' real wages (those taking inflation into account and representing actual spending power) began to stagnate. About this time, the late '60s and early '70s, many formerly stay-at-home wives entered the workforce in reaction to the increased financial pressure. That entry temporarily staved off the inevitable reduction in many American workers' living standards.

But only temporarily for many blue-collar jobs soon disappeared because the factories employing them shut down and moved to other parts of the world where the same work could be done more cheaply. Detroit, among other cities, went from a center of blue-collar life to an area of urban decay.

Furthermore, although American factory workers were the first to suffer the effects of increasing global competition, it has not spared the white-collar worker. The development of information technology has dramatically reduced the need for human information processing, and the managers who manage the processors. By using the Internet, firms can now process orders for new parts and materials online, thus eliminating the need for large numbers of purchasing clerks and the middle level managers who used to supervise them.

Additionally, the Internet means that workers in many key areas no longer need be geographically near their place of work. In industries producing products with little or no transportation costs and little need for knowledge of local conditions, American skilled labor is just not a good buy. When shopping for skilled labor in the global marketplace, an American computer programmer is not as attractive as programmer from Bangalore, India, who can write the same code for a quarter of the cost.

This has led to the recent trend of downsizing which eliminates many middle management jobs and is likely to continue to do so.

In a job market in which American wages are likely to stagnate or slip, and in which downsizing means that workers are likely to spend much of their time in the non-remunerative (not to mention demoralizing) condition known as "looking for work," the husband/breadwinner, wife/homemaker family no longer makes sense for the majority of people.

The American Cargo Cult

In some south pacific islands during WWII, the inhabitants were amazed by the airport runways and the planes of cargo which appeared so suddenly in their midst. At the end of the war, the runways were still there but the planes carrying magnificent cargo no longer came. This gave rise to the famous Cargo Cults that sought to call the planes down from the sky. They made a simulation of what they had seen, constructing planes out of trees and plants in hopes that the sky would get the idea and bring back more planes with the desired cargo.

By calling for a return to the social/sexual rules of the Fifties -- things which were coincident with, rather than causative of, the one-paycheck lifestyle which was the trademark of the Fifties -- the Religious Right resembles a Cargo Cult.

Freedom, great find here. I can understand the desire to return back to a simpler time, but you can't put the Geni back in the bottle. Also I don't see the relegious right as a cult but as a political power for change to a more moral world.

__________________
An informed voter scares the Goverment lackeys.

An American first and always a Conservative.

Several points here though Rob. The fifties were not the "more moral world" that some like to think they were. Some arguements have been made on here that the breakdown of family started with women going to work and furthered with the "women's movement". Some would argue that the decline of morality started with abortion and liberal social programs.

This essay gives a different point of view that could reasonably argue against some of these beliefs. This essay points to economics and capitalism playing a part in both.

As far as the fifties being more moral, consider this:

1. Abortions DID happen in the fifties. Since it was hush hush back then, and no true records now, how do we know the differences in the amounts.

2. Teenage pregnancies also happened in the fifties. There were unwed mother homes, illegal abortions, children sent to "aunt Mary's home" for eight months, forced marriages, ect.

3. There were many more orphanages, so people were not always responsible.

4. There were gangs and gang violence in the fifties also. Certainly not to the extent of today.

5. Forensics are much better now, and so is the media. Murders did happen back then, perhaps even more than reported. And infamous murders would not have received world wide attention.

6. Rapes certainly happened back then, it was however, mostly considered the woman's fault. Often the woman, because of societies outlook on rape, was shamed into silence.

As for the economics from the fifties, did you know that a man making minimum wage could afford to buy a home and provide for his family without the woman working? Could someone making minimum wage now afford to buy a home, even if they don't have a family?

And if someone truly wanted to argue morality, one would also have to compare the ratio's and include increases in population.

We can say that economics had something to do with the break down, but children need to be supervised and many kids are latch key kids because mom and dad are working. I know from experience that I got into more trouble as a kid when I wasn't being watched.

__________________
An informed voter scares the Goverment lackeys.

An American first and always a Conservative.

Maybe it could be considered cylical. When the west was expanding, people left their extended families and settled in the west. There's one breakdown. The dust bowl, the great depression, and wars all caused breakdowns in the extended family. The invention of the automobile, the airplane, ect. caused much more mobility, which also caused a breakdown in the extended family.

By all rights then, things should be looking up, as more people are looking for ways to work at home, and the internet has made that possible.

Maybe your right, I know that as a society we are much more mobile than we used to be. When families relocate for a brighter future, how do they make up for what they left behind?

__________________
An informed voter scares the Goverment lackeys.

An American first and always a Conservative.

Freedom: Very interesting post.....Many obvious, but greatly ignored points made.....I hope, however, the intention of this post isn't to suggest all conservatives are grouped into the "Religious Right".

The 1950's is my favorite decade---bar none. I was a kid then and it was the perfect time to be a kid. At the time I had 3 siblings and we had FUN. We later added two more siblings (for a total of six kids) but the first four had the closes relationship (closer in age). The last two sibs always say, "If you aren't one of The Four you are nothing in this family!" The price of a movie ticket in our small town was 10 cents and the Eagle Theater got our frequent custom and most of our dimes! That was back in the time that sodas came in glass bottles (no plastic, no metal) and there was a 2 cent deposit on each bottle. In order to finance our way to movies and to buy treats we became scavengers, we trolled ditches and the sides of roads to find our bottles so we could return them for the deposit. It would take us awhile to get enough bottles because we always made sure we had enough money that we could all four go to the movies. Then there was our ball games, we didn't have a bat or gloves but we "made do" with what we had. Our bat was a stick and our dad gave us his precious baseball that he had left over from when he was a kid. There was an empty lot next to our house so that is where the games were held.....everyone who stopped by could play. Our rules were whimsical (at best) so there were plenty of arguments and a few fist fights to settle the "official rules". The biggest guy there was usually the "rightest guy" because he had the biggest fist and could persuade the rest of us to "see the light"...by his reckoning anyway.

We didn't have a TV at our house, most everybody else had one, we probably wouldn't have watched one if we'd had it, we were to busy with our good times to take time out for TV watching---that was mostly for "old folks". On Saturday nights I would watch Gunsmoke with my grandpa (who was deaf) so I could keep him up to speed as to what Matt was saying to Miss Kitty! He read lips but he didn't always get the story so I'd help him out.

As children we could run around town all day long and nobody had to worry about anyone kidnapping us, never heard of a pedophile until I was half grown and one moved next door to us. We had a lot of freedom in those days that kids don't have now. We would have laughed at the idea of a "play date". Back then you went outside and played and if someone came along and wanted to play you let them in on the games as well, it was all informal and simple.

Yep, that was my decade. It was great to be a kid then, it may have been rough on the adults but it was a kids paradise. Summers lasted forever, it seemed as if the sun was always shining, God was in his heaven and all was right with our world.