Is the United States losing its moral compass? Are Americans today less committed than in the past to traditional values? Is the country becoming ever more deeply divided between traditionalists and secularists?

The conventional wisdom in many conservative circles is that, yes, fewer American citizens are committed to traditional values, and that the country is much worse off because of this. Violent outbursts in public schools, climbing divorce rates, scandals in high places—all are frequently said to stem from sinking moral standards. More generally, commentators across the ideological spectrum often characterize the United States as fundamentally split between two warring tribes, progressive versus orthodox, liberal versus conservative, red state versus blue state, and so on. Indeed, for people who follow public affairs, the term “culture war” needs no explaining. American politics and society have become so polarized, we hear repeatedly, that there is little room in the middle.

Wayne Baker's timely America's Crisis of Values offers a scholarly response to these social critics and commentators. In the first half of the book, Baker explores three questions: First, are Americans in fact turning their back on traditional moral values? Second, in a comparative sense, are American beliefs about politics, religion, and morality becoming less “exceptional” and more like those in most other industrialized Western societies, such as Britain, Canada, and Australia? And third, is the United States as sharply divided as popular commentators argue?

Drawing on data from the World Values Surveys, 1981–2000, the author responds to all three questions with a clear no. In the first analytical chapter, Baker identifies two value dimensions on which citizens and nations can be positioned: a “Traditional–Secular/Rational” dimension and a “Survival–Self-Expression” dimension. Readers familiar with prior research based on the World Values Surveys (e.g., Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization, 1997) will recognize these value axes. Factor scores indicate that with respect to the first dimension, Americans tend to be more traditional than secular, and that contrary to cultural critics, the degree of traditionalism has not wavered over the last 20 years. This stability is even more remarkable in a cross-national context, the author writes: “America has retained its traditional values while virtually all of its peers are losing their traditional values” (p. 36). This holds even for younger generations in the United States.

At the same time, however, Americans are moving along the second dimension, becoming more supportive of “self-expressive” values. This value configuration makes the United States nearly unique among all the industrialized democracies. Only in Ireland does Baker find a similar coupling of traditional values and a growing desire to realize one's “true potential.” (Figure 2.4 on p. 37 nicely illustrates the persistence of American “exceptionalism.”)

In the third chapter, “Culture War,” the author assesses the distribution of values within the country. Although Americans generally tilt toward the traditional side of the Traditional–Secular/Rational axis, there is a great deal of variation around this central tendency. Citizens do not appear to be split into two potentially hostile blocs. Rather, the distribution of scores looks remarkably bell-like. (Using other surveys and focusing on different kinds of attitudes, Morris Fiorina's Culture War?, which also came out in 2005, makes a similar point about public opinion in the United States.) Baker further shows that positions on this value dimension and the Survival–Self-Expression dimension correlate only loosely with social attitudes (e.g., beliefs about ethics in business) and what he terms “moral visions” (views on whether there are God-given moral absolutes or whether moral standards are relative and flexible). These low correlations are taken as additional support for the claim that Americans are not tightly grouped into two sides, girded for battle over the future of the culture.

In these opening chapters, Baker marshals a considerable amount of survey evidence. The statistical findings reported in an appendix span approximately 50 pages. Even so, more discussion of the measurement of the two key value axes would have been helpful. The questionnaire items used to capture traditional versus secular/rational dispositions seem reasonable (views on obedience to authority, nationalism, the importance of God and religion in one's life, attitudes on abortion, divorce, and euthanasia, to mention only a few). But the Survival–Self-Expression dimension is identified through a curious assortment of questions having to do with, for example, whether the survey respondent feels happy, trusts other people, believes that men make better political leaders than women, wishes to send boys rather than girls to a university, and can justify homosexuality (p. 21; see also pp. 197–200 and note 6 on p. 257). On the face of it, I would have expected any items on gender roles and homosexuality to be associated more with the traditionalism factor.

In the second part of the book, Baker considers why political observers are panicking over the supposed decline of traditional moral values and the polarization of American society, given that the empirical record offers scant evidence. This discussion relies much less on survey findings and is more speculative, as the author acknowledges. Citing the literatures on political realignments and cycles in American history, he suggests that concerns about “values crises” may surface at regular intervals, due perhaps to shifting “moral visions.” In some historical eras, the public leans toward absolutism; in others, relativism is the norm. When there is more disagreement over moral visions, as there apparently is today, commentators are more likely to believe that the country is drifting away from its historic moral roots. This is a subtle argument: Public support for traditional values can be stable across decades and generations, even as popular reasoning about the nature of morality changes.

Wayne Baker has produced a thoughtful and engaging work. Scholars interested in public opinion, values, and the discourse surrounding the culture wars in the United States should read America's Crisis of Values.