Please read and be ready to answer the questions at the bottom.

The perspective of Miss Jones  

Miss Jones is religious, believing in one supreme God that has created all and has final power over all he has created. She is deeply disappointed and disenchanted with the modern experiment, which has not fulfilled all that it promised. At times she expresses real fear of what modernity has brought to her world.. She is convinced that the secular establishment is determined to wipe religion out, or at least wipe out any reference to it in public society. [This is not a totally paranoid reaction. Secularism, bred by modern culture and distributed through mass media, permeates daily life, while governmental doctrines enforce the notion that religion should stay out of those areas it deems common to all citizenry.] Miss Jones looks back to a "golden age" before the interruption of modernity for inspiration, but not in a nostalgic manner. In fact, her community of worship, in which she active participant, is part of a modern movement and could have appeared at no time other than our own. This movement is innovative and often radical in their reinterpretation of its religious basis. Her worship community, in particular, feels obliged by God to step into the public square and influence and direct public policy towards the fruit of their beliefs.

Miss Jones’ community expresses their discontent with a modern development by stressing those elements in their tradition that militate against it. Fundamentally, they are suspicious of democracy as it seems by nature wedded to secularism.

Miss Jones is not a supporter of the women’s rights movements considering the emancipation of women as one of the hallmarks of modern culture.

Miss Jones nearly always feels assaulted by the liberal or modernizing establishment, and her views and behavior, guided by those of her worship leader, can seem more extreme as a result. Her community sees a fissure in society, polarized between those who enjoy secular culture and those who regard it with dread. Her community and similar ones throughout the nation thus foment an internal dispute in public discourse and culture. Some of these communities conduct offensives, which can take many forms, but are designed to bring the mainstream back to the right path and make the world sacred again. They, and Miss Jones in particular, feel that they are fighting for survival, with their backs are to the wall—they believe that they have to fight their way out of this impasse. In this frame of mind, on rare occasions, some resort to acts of violence. The majority, including Miss Jones community, do not, but simply try to revive their faith in a more conventional, lawful way.

This movement does not simply use religion for a political end, but it has been successful in so far as it has pushed religion from the sidelines and back to center stage of public discourse and controversy. It now plays a major part in international affairs, a development that would have seemed inconceivable in the mid-twentieth century when secularism was the ascendant. The movement to which Miss Jones belongs is essentially a rebellion against the secularist exclusion of the divine from public life, and it frequently attempts to make its religious values prevail in the modern world. But the desperation and fear that fuel the individuals of this movement may also tend to distort the religious tradition, accentuating its more aggressive aspects at the expense of those of toleration and reconciliation.

Questions:

1.         What modern groups have similar belief systems to Miss Jones’?

2.         Is Miss Jones belief system humanistic, relativistic or existential?

3.         When moral or ethical situations arise, how would Miss Jones deal with them? From where does moral authority come for Miss Jones? 

4.         Do belief systems such as Miss Jones’ acknowledge or allow for complexity, subtlety or grey areas in the moral life of her community? Does she think that the same should hold for moral life of the general public?

[The source that provided most of the words and all of the ideas will be given later, so as to not prejudice your reaction to Miss Jones.]