By RAY WADDLE

There’s no disputing the meaning of “values” in the Values Voter Summit, an election-cycle assembly of religious conservatives that gathered recently in Washington, D.C.

The most recent public battle to define values was settled two decades ago when conservatives seized on the word to mean opposition to abortion and gay marriage, rejection of evolution and resistance to public putdowns of traditional Christianity.

Also implied were respect for personal responsibility and restraint, a respect for holiness.

Nevertheless, despite obvious organizational skills, the values vote never decisively succeeds. Creationism still lacks credibility. Homosexuality gets more mainstream with each new TV season.

Instead, year after year, a different set of values – seldom discussed, seldom named – tightens its grip on the nation.

These unspoken values keep other values from gaining ground. They disdain traditional religion and old-fashioned courtesies. Yet they are tacitly tolerated by millions of values voters, perhaps for patriotic reasons.

Here are three such values:

1. Social Darwinism. This applies Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” to human society -- the law of the jungle in the marketplace. It drives the economy and frames our fiercely competitive landscape. Many who don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of human origins embrace this social offshoot, which applauds power imbalances between people, accepts the struggle of nation against nation, and justifies $400 million CEO salaries while public programs for poor kids are slashed. It breeds cynicism, envy and fear of the future. It exalts a noisy impulse that embarrassed previous generations of Americans – shameless self-promotion.

2. The new relativism. In the old days, liberals were the ones who were always accused of promoting relativism, the idea that there is no ascertainable truth, no sound argument anymore for God or absolute values. Now, though, with routine denunciations of liberal media and the persistence of talk-show ideologues and bloggers, everyone’s a committed relativist, knowingly or not. To say liberal media is slanted implies an unintended consequence: all other perspectives can be accused of bias too. Public life becomes a scattering of shards – more voices than ever before, but none with the authority to get the whole story or rally citizens to a common purpose.

3. Turbo-individualism. Prosperity and technology have enriched individual lives like never before. They are also isolating people from each other. Millions wake up every morning hating government, hating regulation (even clean-air legislation, even sound banking practices), hating the United Nations, hating progressive tax reform, hating experts of all sorts.

Such habits of mind have nothing to do with religion, yet they are constantly given biblical justification. They feed public policy and private mood. They rev up a climate of extremes that never quite existed in this form before – steroid abuse, 24/7 celebrity updates, pathological interstate road-ragers, staph scares, 20-hour airport waits, subprime mortgage meltdowns, permanently cranky neighbors.

Traditional-values voters will never get far until they challenge the unspoken values that shape politics and commerce and laugh at traditional courtesies. The longer these go undetected, unadmitted, the more powerful their unstated pressure on our every decision.