Pew Research Center Survey Exposes Deep Divides in American Views on Morality
Thomas: A Pew Research study just came out about what Americans view as moral and immoral. This matters for authors because every novel has a moral system. Actions have consequences in your fiction, and what those consequences are is governed by your moral framework as the author. How the story ends is governed by your moral framework. Evaluating that framework is critical.
This is part of why people are fatigued by woke storytelling. They’re fatigued by the woke moral system. They do pattern recognition and say, “I don’t like stories with these elements.” It’s not that they dislike female protagonists. It’s that stories with female protagonists recently tend to carry a woke moral framework that audiences are rejecting.
Let’s go through this Pew Research study. The survey gave respondents three options for each topic: morally wrong, morally acceptable, or not a moral issue.
Married people having an affair
- 90% said morally wrong, the highest of any topic surveyed.
- This is the only issue where Americans have near-universal moral agreement.
Jonathan: That’s the only shared moral anchor point. No matter which side of the spectrum you’re on, loyalty is the one thing everyone agrees on.
Eating meat
- 4% said morally wrong, the lowest of any topic surveyed.
- 41% said morally acceptable.
- 54% said it’s not a moral issue.
Jonathan: You wouldn’t think that based on the amount of entertainment and propaganda covering this. You’d expect the “morally wrong” number to be much higher.
Thomas: It’s because vegans are so loud about being vegan. Every vegan will tell you they’re vegan. That 4% probably lines up close to the actual number of Americans who are vegan.
Viewing pornography
- 52% said morally wrong, the second highest after affairs.
- 15% said morally acceptable.
- 32% said it’s not a moral issue.
Thomas: The number of people who say something isn’t a moral issue at all is its own story here. “My morality doesn’t speak to this” suggests a very limited moral framework.
Jonathan: That usually means they want to keep something out of the moral sphere so it can’t be judged or spoken against. This tracks with the “you do you” epidemic from 2010 to 2020.
Thomas: Very Gen X worldview. I’m okay, you’re okay, I’m not going to judge you.
Jonathan: “As long as it doesn’t affect me, I don’t care.” Well, now it’s affecting you.
Using contraceptives
- 8% said morally wrong, the second lowest.
- 40% said morally acceptable.
- 51% said it’s not a moral issue.
Thomas: In the olden days, contraceptives were very controversial, then almost everyone accepted them. But we’re starting to see the impacts as the birth rate goes to unsustainable levels. Everyone using contraceptives means grandma starving because there’s not enough money in the pension. We’re not there yet, but European countries are going to see it as they start paying for their own defense again and making big cuts to pensions. I’m anticipating a movement as people realize that choosing not to have children affects the economy and affects everyone else too.
Having an abortion
- 47% said morally wrong.
- 21% said morally acceptable.
- 31% said it’s not a moral issue.
Jonathan: The 47% tracks with voting patterns and is expected. But 31% saying it’s not a moral issue is really interesting.
Homosexuality
- 39% said morally wrong.
- 23% said morally acceptable.
- 37% said it’s not a moral issue.
Jonathan: I would’ve expected the morally acceptable number to be higher.
Thomas: I wonder if we’ll see movement on this. There’s a viral post from just yesterday of two gay dads with a surrogate baby, and the baby is saying “mama.” They’re laughing and saying, “No, there’s no mama, there’s daddy or pop.” The baby starts crying. The moral outrage of “you have stolen this baby from its mother” is new. Five years ago it was “you do you, what happens in your bedroom, I don’t care.” Well, this baby cares. This baby doesn’t have a mother and never will.
A lot of these numbers aren’t broken out by generation, but I suspect the large “not a moral issue” responses are heavily weighted toward Gen X, who seem to have the narrowest morality.
Doctor-assisted suicide
- 35% said morally wrong.
- 34% said morally acceptable.
- 30% said it’s not a moral issue.
Jonathan: This has the closest margin of any topic. The morally acceptable number being higher than “not a moral issue” is really surprising.
Thomas: Other than affairs, this is the topic where the fewest people say it’s not a moral issue. Death seems to be a morally charged event. It’s hard to say somebody dying isn’t moral. The moral arguments are strong on both sides. One side says killing people is wrong unless they’ve forfeited their right to life through capital crime. The other says people have a right to die and forcing them to suffer is immoral. Both sides agree this is a moral issue. They just disagree on which direction.
This is similar to the old Democratic framing on abortion. The nineties argument was “safe, legal, and rare,” which acknowledged it wasn’t morally acceptable but argued it should be legal. Now you also have the “shout your abortion” faction that’s proud of it.
Death penalty
- 34% said morally wrong.
- 38% said morally acceptable.
- 26% said it’s not a moral issue.
Thomas: Other than affairs, this has the lowest “not a moral issue” score at 26%. Again, end-of-life issues tend to carry moral weight.
Gambling
- 29% said morally wrong.
- 20% said morally acceptable.
- 50% said it’s not a moral issue.
Jonathan: The 50% are the ones doing it online and telling themselves they’re in control. The 29% don’t do it. The 20% don’t do it either.
Thomas: If you have a Christian worldview, there are two matrices for these kinds of questions: evil versus not evil, and foolish versus not foolish. Some people would say gambling isn’t a sin, but it is a foolish act. It’s not morally charged, it’s wisdom-charged.
Spanking children
- 23% said morally wrong.
- 36% said morally acceptable.
- 39% said it’s not a moral issue.
Jonathan: That number was way higher 15 years ago. I think people started seeing kids who hadn’t been spanked and said, “Nope, let’s bring it back.”
Thomas: I think the anti-spanking crowd is loud, like the vegans. But there’s also truth to the fact that a lack of discipline harms a child too. People see screen-zombie kids who are so poorly self-disciplined they need a screen at all times to not embarrass their parents and wonder if that’s better.
Jonathan: Why would 39% think spanking isn’t a moral issue? Everyone should have an opinion on this.
Thomas: It’s like asking if war is morally acceptable. Either it is or it isn’t. But people don’t really choose war. Every president who’s run for office has run on an anti-war platform, and every single one has initiated conflict. Obama is droning people. Trump is droning people. They’re all droning people.
Using marijuana
- 23% said morally wrong.
- 24% said morally acceptable.
- 52% said it’s not a moral issue.
Jonathan: That’s my experience talking to people about marijuana.
Thomas: This also falls into the wisdom-folly matrix. There’s no prohibition against consuming marijuana in the Bible, which is where I get my moral framework. You can make a strong case that marijuana is included in the blanket of foods God declared clean. But something being religiously clean does not mean consuming it is wise.
Getting a divorce
- 23% said morally wrong.
- 31% said morally acceptable.
- 45% said it’s not a moral issue.
Jonathan: None of these numbers surprise me. The nineties preached hard in favor of divorce. It became a feminist thing for women to free themselves from abusive relationships, and then the definition of “abusive” loosened to include emotionally abusive. 23% morally wrong is exactly what I’d expect.
Thomas: There seems to be a big anti-divorce push in some circles, but I think the people morally opposed to divorce are just really loud about it, like the vegans.
Being extremely rich
- 18% said morally wrong.
- 18% said morally acceptable.
- 63% said it’s not a moral issue, the highest of any topic surveyed.
Jonathan: I track that. An even 18-18 split on either side, and 63% don’t care at all. Why would this be a moral issue? Everyone wants to be rich. Am I going to be a bad person when I get there?
Drinking alcohol
- 16% said morally wrong.
- 29% said morally acceptable.
- 55% said it’s not a moral issue.
Thomas: This is really interesting because of the split among Christians. If you’re Catholic, drinking alcohol is morally acceptable. Consuming wine at mass is a core religious practice. If you’re Baptist, you don’t drink alcohol for communion, you drink grape juice, and alcohol is forbidden.
Jonathan: You’re framing independent Baptists as what they were 25 years ago. The question says “drinking alcohol,” not “alcoholism.” Most of Christianity has grown past the tea-totaling era of the seventies and eighties. That 16% are probably holdovers from that period.
Thomas: One zeitgeist observation on alcohol: overall use in the United States has been declining since its peak in the 1840s. The decline has really accelerated in the last 10 years because Gen Z doesn’t drink alcohol at all. If you’re staying home on a screen all day, you’re not out drinking. The alcohol industry is hurting. If you’re making an 18-year bourbon, you put that bourbon in a barrel 18 years ago when millennials were still drinking, and now you’re breaking it open while Gen Z doesn’t care.
If you listen to Gen Z articulate why they don’t drink, they don’t frame it morally. They frame it on the health matrix. Alcohol is bad for you.
Part of me wonders if there’s been a change in our gut biome. I have a theory that people process alcohol more poorly than their ancestors did, partly because of all the antibiotics we consume. You read historical accounts of how much Winston Churchill drank. He was powered on cigars, hard alcohol, and hatred of Nazis. That was his diet for the whole war. I watched a YouTube video of guys trying to recreate Churchill’s daily drinking schedule. They had good accounts of how much he drank and when. They followed it exactly, and they were completely non-functional. They were not ready to run a country and take down the Nazis.
In vitro fertilization
- 9% said morally wrong.
- 42% said morally acceptable.
- 47% said it’s not a moral issue.
Thomas: I’m expecting this one to move quite a bit as people learn more about it.
Jonathan: Nobody knows anything about it right now.
Thomas: People don’t understand how IVF destroys a bunch of fertilized embryos in the process. Many pro-lifers would consider those babies. Even the babies that go to term often have long-term health ramifications. I think that’s going to move the numbers, but right now only 9% think it’s morally wrong.
Jonathan: That looks like propaganda data to me. Most of what’s being put out about IVF right now is positive. People are either for it or against it because they were told to be. I think the “not a moral issue” number is going to shrink and we’ll see more distribution on either side.
Thomas: My guess is most people don’t even know what IVF is. The safest answer is “it’s not a moral issue.”
What’s the big takeaway for authors?
Jonathan: When I look at these numbers, the takeaway is that a third to a half of American society doesn’t want anything to be a moral issue. That’s disturbing. They want to remove things from the moral binary.
Thomas: You need to know who you’re writing for when you’re structuring your novel and setting up consequences. Knowing your reader’s moral framework is really important.
Jonathan: You need to know how your reader is going to react to the moral issues you’re posing. If they don’t think pornography is a problem, you can’t make that the climax that breaks your family or your romance beat. Cheating always works.
Why does worldview in children’s books matter?
Thomas: There’s a children’s book my dad read as a kid. He read it to me and I’m reading it to my children. One day I realized this book from the 1950s has a terrible moral framework. It’s called Little Black, one of those pony stories. A boy loves his pony Little Black, but then he gets Big Red, a big horse that can do tricks Little Black can’t. Little Black gets sad, stops eating, and runs away.
The boy chases Little Black on Big Red across a frozen lake. The ice cracks, Big Red falls in, the boy falls in and starts drowning. He calls for Little Black, who comes back and rescues him because he’s light enough to walk on the ice. Everyone celebrates Little Black.
I looked at this and thought, this entire problem was created by Little Black’s envy. If Little Black had been a little more thankful, none of this would have happened. He helped solve the problem he himself created. That is not a thing of moral celebration. Big Red did nothing wrong. It’s not his fault he’s bigger and stronger. He’s framed as the villain because he’s competent, and Little Black is framed as virtuous because he’s sad. This is the moral framework of baby boomers. This book poisoned an entire generation into despising competence as morally bad.
Jonathan: The one that connects with it is Rainbow Fish, the book about the fish with shiny scales. Everyone wanted his scales, he said no, and everyone treated him like the bad guy. At the end he gave everyone one of his scales, and that’s what made him a good person. It was just socialism. You’re a bad fish for having pretty rainbow scales that you won’t share. Just because you have something someone else doesn’t have doesn’t mean you’re morally required to give it to them.
Thomas: Because the morality was embedded in the story itself, no sermon was ever given. No one detected the moral message, but they still internalized it. That’s the power. You can embed a moral framework into your stories. In fact, you are embedding one whether you mean to or not, and your readers are internalizing it.
You owe it to your readers to embed a good moral framework. I have an entire episode on the Christian Publishing Show about why the Chronicles of Narnia have been so enduringly popular. It’s because the moral framework works. The children are vicious, nasty, and evil, and they go through a repentance arc in every story. They’re not good and virtuous, but they are moral. The story is moral even though the children are bad.
What we see now are stories where the characters are good but the actual moral framework structured by the author is bad. The characters are too good to be believable and the consequences aren’t real enough. Real consequences for real actions can help your readers avoid real evil. If you look at the old fairytales, the consequences are brutal, and they were brutal for a purpose.
Sources:
What Do Americans Consider Immoral? | Pew Research Center
Pew Research Center X Post with Chart and Full Report Link
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