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| The sudden new vitality in the "born again" political moments has raised the question of the resurgence of "culture wars" -- the allegedly polarizing struggle between the religious right and the liberal left over such issues as gay marriage and abortion and evolution. In fact, the culture wars are mystical, indeed mythological, and they exist only in the interstices of the news cycle --that is to say Never-Never Land. They consist of press releases and statements made by the leaders of activist movements to fill up vacant space and time when nothing else is appearing on the cable networks. | ||||
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The activists are not so much trying to scare their enemies as to scare their allies about what the enemies are plotting. Americans are not a people who tend to polarization. Rather, almost unreflectively, they try to seize the sensible middle ground. The serious research on polarization shows that it mostly is the noise generated in battles between activist leadership, between for example those who see dire threats to "the family" from gay marriage and those who argue there is a constitutional right for gays to celebrate their unions with rituals. The vast middle ground is occupied by the rest of the population who see nothing wrong with civil unions. Many of the "born again" movements tell us that they are merely trying to take America back from the liberals who, for example, are imposing the theology of Darwin on schoolchildren. Americans, they argue, have the right to demand equal time for their explanations and thus exclude evolution as "science" from the classroom and, while they're at it, to ban "obscene" books from libraries. |
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The politics of the "born agains" are both serious and sincere. However, they want to impose their religious convictions on the rest of the country by political power. The project is profoundly un-American and potentially dangerous. However, they do not have the power, save in some limited regions of the country, to accomplish their goals. My colleague Professor Michael Hout and I have written a book called The Truth about Conservative Christians which demolishes some of the myths about the born-again movements. The first myth is that born-again Christians are all Republicans. In fact, working-class, religiously conservative Christians are more likely to vote Democratic. The second is that those who are Republicans are numerous enough to control the outcome of a national election. In fact, at the most they can add only one percentage point to a national election, which gives them enough clout in certain areas to tip the balance of an election because of the chicanery of judges -- election judges and Supreme Court justices. And this can happen more than occasionally in situations where an ideologically polarized electorate is divided equally. If the 2004 presidential election was in fact stolen by born-again voters and election judges, the appropriate strategy is to mobilize your own electorate or -- even better -- mobilize the moderate voters. People vote their own economic interests. The working-class born-agains voted Democratic because they saw that the Democrats were more likely to provide resources that they needed or wanted. In the present economic situation, the decisive question is whether the economic legacy of the last presidency is less important to the non-ideological voters than "taking back America" -- and more important than racist resentment. I have no doubt about the former issue. About the latter I am not so sure. Is racism more important than your income, your health care, the education of your children? But don't blame that choice on the Evangelical Christians. |
 A Stupid, Unjust, And Criminal War: Iraq 2001-2007 Father Greeley calls to task those who justified, planned and executed the war and reminds us that God weeps at the destruction of war, whether lives lost are ‘ours’ or ‘theirs.’  Order
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