Liberals and traditionalists are talking about entirely different things when they address values.  Like Big Brother in George Orwell's chilling novel 1984, liberals employ a NewSpeak lexicon in which the word values is unrelated to its historical meaning.

Two things explain this gulf.  First, liberalism is the American sect of the international religion of socialism.  Second, socialism is a secular and materialistic religion.

When liberals speak of values they are talking about material goods and services, which are presumed to flow exclusively from collectivized government.  Those values fall under the heading of so-called social justice, or redistribution of income and property as equally as possible.

In a July 3, 2004, New York Times article headlined "Kerry Invoking 'Values' Theme to Frame Issues," reporter Jodi Wilgoren wrote: "Forty-eight minutes into a rambling speech about education, health care, jobs and equal opportunity here the other morning, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts went off-script to sum up his White House quest in a simple sentence. "In the end it's about values," he told a conference of the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition."

In the same vein, a Reuters dispatch dated October 24, 2004, said: "Earlier, Kerry liberally quoted scripture as he told supporters in Fort Lauderdale that the Bible demanded deeds to match words and said his faith gave him "values to live by and to apply to the decisions that I make."

"I will put middle class families and those struggling to join them ahead of the interests of the well-to-do and the well connected," he said. "Justice and lasting peace require the strength of our ideals as well as the strength of our arms."

Viewing values as strictly secular and materialistic inputs, and measuring them by income levels, is straight out of Karl Marx, who wrote that religion is the opium of the masses, conceived by the ruling classes to oppress the workers, and that human behavior is a variable controlled by the physical conditions in which people work and earn their livings. 

The writings of every socialist, from Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte to Irving Howe, the late dean of American liberal-socialists, affirm that socialism is a secular religion and that liberalism is its American sect. 

Bertrand Russell, one of the last century’s most prominent socialists, said of the German socialist party: “For Social Democracy is not a mere political party, nor even a mere economic theory; it is a complete self-contained philosophy of the world and of human development; it is, in a word, a religion and an ethic.  To judge the work of Marx, or the aims and beliefs of his followers, from a narrow economic standpoint, is to overlook the whole body and spirit of their greatness.” (from Lecture One, German Social Democracy).

Two decades before Marx, Auguste Comte proclaimed The Religion of Humanity.  God and spiritual religion were dismissed as superstitious ignorance, a belief absorbed by the youthful Herbert Croly attending a church of The Religion of Humanity in Manhattan.  In 1871 his father had written A Positivist Primer, an introduction for American readers to Comte’s philosophy of Positivism and his secular Religion of Humanity.  Young Herbert became the famous founding editor of The New Republic, the most influential periodical of American liberalism in the first half of the 20th century.

American liberals' focus on secular materialism also reflects the precepts of John Dewey, their leading icon during this period.  Professor Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy called for scrapping all existing ideas of morality, philosophy, and religion, because he regarded them as impediments to the advancement of science and to the socialist catechism of social justice.  

In his 1908 lecture at Columbia University on Intelligence and Morals, Professor Dewey said, “…the abandonment by intelligence of a fixed and static moral end was the necessary precondition of a free and progressive science of both things and morals…The effective control of [men's] powers is not through precepts, but through the regulation of their conditions. (italics added)…

"…The progress of [Darwinian evolutionary] biology has accustomed our minds to the notion that intelligence is not an outside power presiding supremely but statically over the desires and efforts of man, but is a method of adjustment of capacities and conditions within specific situations [i.e., moral relativism].  History has discovered itself in the idea of [evolutionary] process.  The genetic standpoint makes us aware that the systems of the past are neither fraudulent impostures nor absolute revelations; but are the products of political, economic, and scientific conditions whose change caries with it change of theoretical formulations [i.e., today's "values" are valid only until further notice].

"…From this point of view there is no separate body of moral rules; no separate system of motive powers; no separate subject-matter of moral knowledge, and hence no such thing as an isolated ethical science.”

In other words, the Judeo-Christian tradition of timeless moral virtues, the essence of Western civilization, is unscientific nonsense. Liberal “values” are expressed in regulations devised by intellectuals like Professor Dewey to herd the masses into the conformity of egalitarian social justice. 

Teaching children American history and traditions with stories of patriotic, honest, respectful, courageous conduct cultivates individualism and therefore interferes with preparing students for collective living.  Concepts such as spiritual religion and moral codes are “value judgments,” and therefore unacceptable.

Thomas E. Brewton had the extraordinary good fortune to study political philosophy under Eric Voegelin and Constitutional law under Walter Berns. His website is The View from 1776.

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