Americans Say U.S. Moral Values at a Seven-Year Low

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 rate moral values in the U.S. 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 U.S. 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’s 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 it differently, 63 percent of U.S. adults said they were “dissatisfied with the ethics and moral standards of the American people.”58