The law is one thing, morality another; they are always related but never the same. The susceptibility of our politics to moral panics, and of our moral commitments to new laws and legal rulings is a regrettable feature of our national life. Yes, some important legal and political reforms in America, such as the abolition of slavery, began as moral movements, but other moral movements, such as Prohibition, went astray precisely by seeking a legal enforcement of virtue. The law is a teacher, as the new integralists are always reminding us, but woe to the society for which it has become the only effective teacher, or the only meaningful test. A single-minded focus on legal and political reforms often simplifies complex social realities and preempts real moral reflection, replacing the full palette of values—of good and bad, better and worse—with the black-and-white of right and wrong or the gray of moral indifference. This tendency flattens our public morality into a deadening binary of what will land you in jail or get you fired, and what won’t. If it won’t, then, to use the current expression, “It’s all good.” But it isn’t all good. There are social evils to which the appropriate response is not primarily legal or political, just as there are political or legal resolutions that do not settle moral questions. Let both the holdovers of the old Moral Majority and the champions of the Great Awokening take note.