What is moral sanctity? Sanctity in the moral worldviews of U.S. political liberals

Abstract

The moral worldviews of liberals and conservatives in the United States have been extensively studied in the political sphere, revealing the peripheral role of sanctity in the worldviews of liberals. This paper provides a commentary on this previous research and then presents a qualitative study that seeks to explore liberals’ personal meanings of sanctity from a more grounded approach. Liberals’ personal experiences of sanctity involved bodily contamination, interpersonal breaches, and lack of self-control. To further interpret these findings, we situate them in the context of two constructs measured quantitatively, namely, moral perceptions of sanctity violations and transcendental self-concepts. Results suggest that overall, certain forms of sanctity are meaningful within liberals’ moral understandings, but these sanctity concerns may obtain their significance alongside other moral concerns. Findings help to illuminate what moral sanctity means to political liberals in the United States and the multiple ways that sanctity can be moralized by different groups.

Keywords:

• Sanctity
• Morality
• Transcendental self-concept
• U.S. liberals

Acknowledgements

Our sincere thanks to Francesca Giammalva and Monica Moua for their assistance preparing materials and collecting data, and to Grace Lozano, Eleanor Fisk, and Jabari Matthews for their assistance constructing the coding scheme and establishing its reliability. We also thank Casey Watters for her assistance in the early literature search, and Katrina Drury, Lily Massaro, and Audrey Williams for their helpful writing feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Finally, we express our gratitude to the four anonymous reviewers and the editor for their feedback. The manuscript is much stronger now as a result.