Conservative Americans seem to love candidates who speak about values. Unfortunately most of that discourse has been the language of the religious right, which focuses on personal or so-called "family" values. But at the core of a good society is the moral priority of the common good.
Biblical tradition reminds us that ignoring the social conditions that perpetuate poverty and injustice ultimately undermines the realization of family values while destroying the bonds of mutual responsibility that constitute a good society.
The founders of the republic put the interests of the common good above the interests of the private. As historian Gordon Wood has said, “The sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of whole formed the essence of republicanism … and the great deficiency of existing governments was precisely the sacrificing of the public good to the private greed of small ruling groups.”
If we can re-establish the fundamental moral priority for the nation of the public or common good to what the founders originally held dear and what the biblical tradition teaches, we might have a fulcrum by which to pry the American moral spirit free from the prison into which the Tea Party and severely conservative Republicans have confined it.
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