Poll: Moral values in U.S. worsening

Americans may be split between warring political and cultural camps, but there is something most of them can agree on: They share a dim view of their country’s moral values.

More than 80 percent of people polled by Gallup last month rate moral values in the United States as fair or poor — a seven-year low — and 77 percent of respondents to a new Gallup poll say the state of moral values will continue to get worse.

In the 16 years Gallup has asked Americans whether their country’s moral values were getting better or worse, social conservatives have consistently been the most pessimistic — more likely than moderates or social liberals to say the situation was getting worse.

Now moderates have that distinction. Eighty-six percent of moderates say moral values in the United States are worsening. That compares with 77 percent of social conservatives (an 11-percentage-point drop from last year) and 71 percent for social liberals.

In the survey’s history, there has never been a majority of Americans with a rosy view of the state of the nation’s moral values. The question in the current survey has been asked since 2002. In 1991, when Gallup framed the question differently, 63 percent of U.S. adults said they were “dissatisfied with the ethics and moral standards of the American people.”

When were Americans upbeat about moral values in recent history? The percentage of them giving U.S. moral values a rating of excellent or good peaked at 26 percent in November 2004 — the month George W. Bush was re-elected to the U.S. presidency.

In 2004, 27 percent of those polled thought the state of moral values in the United States was improving. Gallup’s annual poll on U.S. moral values is based on telephone interviews with a random national sample of 1,011 adults above the age of 18.