"Our Secularist Democratic Party"

A month ago, Daniel Henninger had a well-received article at OpinionJournal:

Soon after its decision in Lawrence on private sexual acts between consenting adults of the same gender, the Supreme Court this week decided that next year its bucketful of gasoline for the eternal flames of America's "culture wars" will be to decide the constitutionality of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Generally, the culture wars are thought to pit extreme believers on the "religious right," living primarily in the Southern states, against sophisticates in the urban North and far West. In the North, where people get their information about life in the South mainly through a TV screen, the "religious right" came to life mainly as images of televangelists, such as Jimmy Swaggart, pourin' sweat and beggin' forgiveness, or Tammy Faye Bakker, mascara rivering down her face for similar reasons.

My first up-close contact with the tensions of the culture wars came in 1992 at the Republican convention in Houston, waiting in a large auditorium with several thousand "pro-life, pro-family" religious activists to hear Dan Quayle. What struck me is how far removed these people seemed from the Bible-whacking, shotgun-rack stereotype. Standing around in conversation, they seemed to be mostly educated, 30-something, Texas suburbanites who worked in the technology sector and worried about running their kids' sports leagues. They really loved Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush's running mate, and were mocked mercilessly, in public and private, by the out-of-town press corps.

The Robertson-Falwell tent show has faded, but it remains a given in our politics that something called the Christian right now aligns with the Republicans, and that President Bush is a co-dependent. With the presidential election upon us, it seemed a good time to revisit the "religious right," and so I ventured from Manhattan to the belly of the beast, or one of the bellies--Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas. The congregation numbers 22,000, and Prestonwood's pastor is the Rev. Jack Graham, who is also president of the almost 20-million member Southern Baptist Convention, a font of anxiety for orthodox liberals....

Henninger cites an article in The Public Interest, Fall 2002, which sparked a lot of thinking that The Blog from the Core has already noticed:

• "Practical Atheism"
• "The Godless Party: Media Bias & Blindness — And the Big Story They Missed"
• "Political Orphans: How the Democratic Party Left Traditional Believers Behind"

The Public Interest article is now available on-line:

Anyone who has followed American politics over the past decade cannot help but feel some concern about the supposed fundamentalist Christian threat to democratic civility, pluralism, and tolerance. At the very least, the attentive citizen would find it hard not to regard the cultural and political positions of fundamentalists as outside the mainstream, given the volume of media stories that have conveyed this point. At the same time, the media's obsession with politicized fundamentalism distracts public attention from the changing role of religion in political life today. In particular, the media overlooks the remarkable erosion of denominational boundaries that until a quarter century ago defined the religious dimension of partisan conflict, with Catholics, Jews, and southern evangelicals aligned with the Democratic party and nonsouthern white, mostly mainline Protestants forming the religious base of the Republicans. Also, the media mistakenly frames cultural conflict since the 1970s as entirely the result of fundamentalist revanchism. In so doing, the media ignores the growing influence of secularists in the Democratic party and obfuscates how their worldview is just as powerful a determinant of social attitudes and voting behavior as is a religiously traditionalist outlook....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 11/17/03 07:54:11 AM
Categorized as Political.