Role models can be highly influential in conveying ethical standards. This study investigates the influence various categories of role models have had on a population of over 1,600 undergraduate students in Texas, Oregon and Michigan. Those identifying clergy, boy scout leaders, friends and college advisors as role models exhibited less willingness to adopt questionable ethical behavior in negotation situations. Journalist and spouse role models tended to cause students to be more accepting of questionable behavior. Individuals with strong end-result and social (...) contract ethical philosophies, as well as males and those who served in the military exhibited strong tendencies toward less than ethical behavior. Individuals with strong rule ethical philosophy, high levels of religiousity, and those with a cooperative attitude in negotiations tended to adopt higher ethical standards in negotiations. (shrink)

Modern secularity as a historically specific hegemonic social formation that prevailed in the U.S. in the mid-20th century depended on and was, in part, constituted by the exclusion of fundamentalists and their Bible-based moral rhetorics from public life. This essay argues that the movements for temperance, prohibition, and prohibition repeal were an important context in which the political and cultural predominance of white theologically conservative Protestants was made, unmade, and finally gave way to emerging secular voices that repudiated Protestant campaigns (...) to "legislate morality." Science, reason, and an etiquette of civility and ecumenicism came together in the prohibition repeal movement as integral elements of the nascent normative religiousity and public morality that we know retrospectively as modern secularity. (shrink)