In the early 1960s two judicial rulings jolted America out of reliance on schools to teach good conduct. At the same time that the Supreme Court prohibited school prayer and bible reading in public schools, the longstanding Hollywood studio system slowly faded to black. The profile of celebrities changed in various ways: they could chart their own careers, manage their own personal lives and also weigh in on pressing moral issues of the day. As a vacuum of moral authority opened up in America, some celebrities independently stepped in to fill it.

Celebrities didn’t initially wield much moral authority in the 1960s, certainly not in the way that rabbis, priests, ministers, philosophy professors, school teachers and civic leaders did. Stars began to use their power over fans and the media to change America, as various news stories illustrate. Paul Newman and Marlon Brando marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963 in Washington, DC. A few years later Muhammed Ali spoke out against the Vietnam War and went to jail for it. The trend continued. In the mid-1970s Marlon Brando protested the treatment of Native Americans and would not accept his Oscar for Last Tango in Paris; he sent a Native American in full tribal dress instead. In the 1990s Barbra Streisand decreed a boycott of Colorado; she wanted to compel residents to protect lesbians and gays there from hate crimes. Just days after the American invasion of Iraq, Michael Moore used his acceptance speech at the 2003 Oscars to bemoan, "We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fictitious duct tape or the fictitious orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you." Just one more example: Meryl Streep used her award speech at the 2017 Golden Globes to criticize Donald Trump’s mocking of disabled New York Times reporter and so to undermine the president’s moral bona fides.

Gradually, moral authority has shifted from traditional spokesmen to movie stars and rock singers and professional athletes. This is all to the good, for several counterintuitive reasons. It turns out that who tells us how to feel about war involvement or immigrant settlements or disaster relief counts at least as much as what they tell us. Maybe it shouldn’t be this way, but it is. Beyond that, the very idea of moral credentials rests on awfully thin ice, as I show in this book. Watergate, the Roman Catholic priestly pedophile scandal, and family values evangelicals who turn out to be pervs have wearied the modern public. Remember as well that for celebrities, morality is volunteer work: they don’t earn their money by their ethical guidance. And very few stars pretend to be moral exemplars, unlike the frequently hypocritical elite we’ve been stuck with for the past century.