AWarforthe
Soul of America
A History of the Culture Wars
ANDREW HARTMAN
The University of Chicago Press CHICAGO AND LONDON
3
Taking God’s
Country Back
In an influential 1976 essay, “What Is a Neoconservative? ,” Irving Kristal wrote that he and his fellow neoconservatives tended “to be respectful of traditional values and institutions,” religion being perhaps
the most important such traditional institution. Yet Kristal was not
very religious himself. As it was for other New York intellectuals, even
most neoconservatives, Judaism was more about his cultural identity
than about his religious affiliation. Nevertheless, he valued religion as
foundational to representative democracy, believing it helped curb
the unmoored urges of people left to their own devices. “The individual who is abruptly ‘liberated’ from the sovereignty of traditional
values will soon find himself experiencing the vertigo and despair of
nihilism.” These feelings, Kristal warned, were what tempted people
to submit to authoritarian rule.1
In this elocution, neoconservatives helped articulate yet another
conservative paradigm for understanding the dangers presented by
cultural radicalism, endowing conservative America with a powerful
rhetorical weapon to fight the culture wars. And yet it is doubtful that
neoconservatives entirely grasped the full extent of “the vertigo and
despair” that millions of Christian Americans felt living in post-sixties
America. This was particularly true of white evangelicals, whose interpretations of the sixties cultural revolutions grafted onto older understandings about the grave dangers posed by modernity.
Thanks to several Great Awakenings since the colonial era, the
United States has long been home to the world’s largest population of
evangelical Christians, Protestants who pay less attention to liturgy
than to personal conversion and piety and who believe entry to God’s
Taking God’s Country Back 71
kingdom requires that they spread his word on earth. That evangelicals have tended to mix their religious and national identities has long
tinged the rhetoric of American cultural politics with an eschatological hue. This became increasingly so in the twentieth century as more
and more religious Americans felt scarred by the acids of modernity,
which burned gaping, irreparable holes in the fabric of Christian
America. For them the culture wars, more than a battle over national
identity, have served as a struggle for the soul of America, a clash over
what it means to live in a world in which all foundations had been
pulled out from under, a world in which, at its starkest, “God is dead.”2
Even devout evangelicals-devout evangelicals especially-had to
act upon the implications of modernity. In pushing back against modernist forms of knowledge that fanned the flames of religious skepticism, such as biblical criticism and Darwinism, early-twentiethcentury conservative evangelicals-many of whom, by the 1920s,
accentuated biblical inerrancy and began referring to themselves as
“fundamentalists” -successfully enacted laws that mandated reading
the King James Bible in schools and outlawed the teaching of evolution. Such activism sprang from a desire to reassert religious control
over a society that was becoming increasingly modern and secular.3
By the 1970s, conservative white evangelicals were confronted with
a perfect storm of secular power that they deemed a threat to their
way of life and to the Christian nation they believed the United States
once was and ought to be again. This realization, more than anything
else, led religious conservatives to take up arms in the culture wars.
Worldly activism became more imperative, so much so that conservative evangelicals formed an uneasy political alliance with conservative Americans from different theological backgrounds. Even fundamentalists, whose insistence upon correct doctrine meant that minor
differences in biblical interpretation often led to major schisms, reluctantly joined forces with conservative Catholics, Jews, and Mormons.
This was all the more remarkable given that many fundamentalists
viewed the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, as a sign that
the end times were fast approaching. 4
The overarching issue for religious conservatives, and what brought
them together with their former adversaries, was the threat posed by
an increasingly secular state. School prayer, long practiced in most
American public schools, had been rendered unconstitutional by the
landmark 1962 Engel v. Vitale Supreme Court decision. In 1978, in
72 CHAPTER THREE
another example of how the secular state encroached upon Christian
America, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) implemented a federal
mandate requiring that Christian private schools comply with desegregation practices or risk having their tax-exempt status revoked. The
Christian Right-as it came to be known by 1980, the year it helped
elect Ronald Reagan president, signaling its arrival as a powerful political alliance-worked from the assumption that an increasingly secular government represented the gravest threat to Christian values.
Part of this had to do with the conservative religious impression that
the government conspired against the traditional family unit. In an
earlier era, when William Jennings Bryan’s biblically inspired populism appealed to millions of Americans, evangelicals had often married their anxieties about the family to progressive economic concerns
about the destructive force of unregulated monopoly capitalism. But
by the 1970s, the traditionalist worldview of conservative Christians
and the antistatist premises that inspired more and more Americans
were no longer mutually exclusive ideological trajectories. As an instructive example, conservatives posited that government’s meddling
in the form of welfare policies weakened the traditional family structure. “Families are strong when they have a function to perform,” conservative activist Connie Marshner contended. “And the more government, combined with the helping professions establishment, take
away the functions families need to perform-to provide their health
care, their child care, their housing-the less purpose there is for a
family, per se, to exist.”5
By the same logic, the Christian Right focused on the role of public
education. State-run schools were thought to be the primary secular
institution geared to disrupt the inculcation of religious values that
had traditionally transpired in the family.
As long as there has been American public education, there has
been resistance to elements of it, hailing from a variety of different
forces all along the political and religious spectrums. Such resistance
took on mostly conservative overtones in the twentieth century, when
the national curriculum slowly but surely merged with the progressive curriculum innovated by John Dewey and a cohort of prominent pedagogues at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College. Progressive education was a secular movement that sought to distance
the national curriculum from the ecumenical Protestantism that had
Taking God’s Country Back 73
been its organizing force since Horace Mann’s common school movement in the early nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, progressives
clashed with fundamentalists over an assortment of curricular items,
particularly over mandatory Bible reading and over whether to teach
Darwin’s evolutionary science or creationism. 1his collision famously
sparked the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, which
put fundamentalists on the map, often as a source of derision for more
cosmopolitan-minded Americans. H. L. Mencken’s acerbic commentary on the trial painted a harsh picture of fundamentalists as rubes
who promoted the story of Genesis because it was “so simple that
even a yokel can grasp it.”6
By the end of the 1930s, to the dismay of conservatives, the progressive curriculum had become even more prevalent in many schools
across the country. Teacher’s College professor Harold Rugg’s popular textbooks Man and His Changing Society, which incorporated the
scholarship of progressive historian Charles Beard, who subjected
the American past to the paradigm of class conflict, were assigned to
more than five million students in five thousand school districts. But
conservative resistance to progressivism grew as well, made evident
by the successful movement in the early 1940s to remove Rugg’s textbooks from schools. By the early Cold War, conservative educational
vigilantism, abetted by McCarthyism, had turned back the tides of
the progressive curriculum across the nation. In the 1950s, as thousands of progressive educators learned the hard way, mere mention
of Dewey was likened to summoning the ghost of Karl Marx. But despite its reach, Cold War conservatism kept a lid on liberalizing curricular trends for only a short time. The cultural earthquakes of the
sixties shattered the short-lived antiprogressive consensus formed in
the early Cold War. By the 1970s, the Christian Right had valid reason
to believe that the nation’s public schools no longer represented their
moral vision.7
The Supreme Court enshrined secularism in the schools with a series of landmark cases, most famously the 1962 Engel v. Vitale ruling
that New York’s twenty-two-word school prayer violated the First
�endment’s Establishment Clause. In 1963 the court built an even
.higher wall of separation between church and state with its School
District of Abington Township v. Schempp decision in favor of Ellary
ldiempp, a Unitarian freethinker who challenged the constitutional-
L
74 CHAPTER THREE
ity of mandatory Bible reading in his high school. In polls taken since
the sixties, the school prayer and Bible-reading rulings have routinely
ranked as the most unpopular Supreme Court decisions, particularly
among conservative Christians, many of whom considered Engel and
Abington the beginning of American civilization’s downfall. Some
members of Congress received more letters about school prayer and
Bible reading than any other issues. Millions of Americans showed
their displeasure with the new law of the land by disobeying it, as
students in schools across the country, particularly in the South and
Midwest, persisted in their age-old practice of praying and reading
the Bible together. Those who disagreed with Engel and Abington contended that it was undemocratic for the “philosopher-kings” on the
Supreme Court to overrule the majority of Americans who wanted
children to pray in school. Wtlliam Buckley Jr. gave voice to a growing conservative displeasure with the Supreme Court, which, due to
its “ideological fanaticism,” he argued, “is making it increasingly difficult for our society to breathe normally: to govern itself through established tradition and authority; to rule by the local consensus; to
deal effectively with its domestic enemies; to carry forward its implicit commitment to the faith of its fathers.”8
Post-sixties curriculum trends also distressed conservative Christians. In social studies classes, students were increasingly challenged to
clarify their own values, independent of those instilled by parents and
churches. In science, teachers slowly overcame the perpetual taboo
against teaching evolution. And in health classes, honest discussion
of sex came to replace moral exhortation. A popular anthropology
curriculum created for elementary students by psychologist Jerome
Bruner in the early 197os-MACOS, or Man: A Course of Studyexemplified the secularization of the curriculum. During a MA COS
unit students examined the Netsilik Eskimo culture, including their
practice of killing the elderly, in order to understand and not judge
cultural differences. Such relativistic lesson plans became the norm.
In 1969 the National Education Association (NEA) advocated what
it called the “inquiry method” of instruction, a Socratic discussion
technique that would allow students “to view knowledge as tentative
rather than absolute” and thus “to see that value judgments cannot be
accepted solely on faith.” Opposing MACOS-style learning became a
rallying cry for Christian culture warriors. “Your tax dollars are being
Taking God’s Country Back 75
used,” Jesse Helms cautioned recipients of a 1976 fundraising letter,
“to pay for grade school courses that teach our children that cannibalism, wife swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are
acceptable behavior.”9
Religious conservatives organized against these curriculum reform
efforts from the outset, particularly against sex education, which was
becoming an increasingly common feature of the national curriculum.
In 1963 Dr. Mary Calderone founded the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) on the premise that objective sex education was a more realistic means to suppress the sexual revolution than chastisement. Many educators agreed with her,
including Sally Williams, a school nurse in Anaheim, California, who
created a popular sex education curriculum. Williams sought to direct
students away from premarital sex, but her curriculum described sexual intercourse in relatively graphic fashion for students as young as
twelve and provided information to older students about birth control, in recognition that premarital sex was likely. Religious conservatives, predictably moralist, opposed such an approach and in 1969, after gaining a majority on the Anaheim school board, promptly ended
the sex education program.10
Conservatives elsewhere replicated the efforts of Anaheim activists. Fundamentalist preacher Billy James Hatgis’s Christian Crusade
helped launch a national movement against sex education. Hargis’s
lieutenant Gordon Drake authored a pamphlet-“Is the Schoolhouse
the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?” -that purportedly sold ninety
thousand copies in three months. Hargis and Drake forever engraved
SIECUS, “the pornographic arm of liberal education,” as a subversive
group in the conservative lexicon, “all a part of a giant communist
conspiracy.” In his stock speech, Hargis claimed that sex education
was part of a larger plan hatched by progressive educators to “destroy
the traditional moral fiber of America and replace it with a pervasive
sickly humanism.” In a letter to Christian Crusaders, Hargis complained about a sex education program in Jefferson County, Colorado,
where the principal “said that the concept of morality being taught in
his school to elementary grade children was quite different from that
of their parents and pastors, and the kids would have to decide which
was right.”11
In Kanawha County, West Virginia, violent protests erupted when
76 CHAPTER THREE
the school board sought to align with a 1970 state regulation mandating that all West Virginia students read texts reflecting the nation’s
multiethnic composition. Toe Kanawha textbook fight, described in
hyperbolic fashion as “the shot heard around the world,” influenced
the Christian Right’s approach to later curriculum battles. Alice
Moore, the wife of a local evangelical minister who was elected to the
Kanawha board in 1970 on a conservative platform that included an
anti-sex education plank, was the first to object to the proposed reading list. Due to her tireless campaigning during the summer of 1974,
when the Kanawha schools opened that September at least 20 percent
of the student population stayed home. In sympathy, county coal miners organized a wildcat strike. Violence marred the campaign: buses
were shot at, teachers were harassed, and a school district building
was firebombed. National right-wing groups descended upon West
Virginia to join the cause, including the John Birch Society and the Ku
Klux Klan, the latter of which held a notorious rally at the state capitol.
Behind the scenes, the newly formed Heritage Foundation, still a relatively unknown right-wing think tank, offered free legal support to
protestors and organized a conference on the rights of parents. Connie Marshner, the Heritage Foundation’s first director of education,
later maintained that the West Virginia story called attention to “the
textbook problem across the country ” and helped inform the Christian Right during its later culture war struggles.
12
Not surprisingly, racial anxieties factored into the Kanawha textbook battle. Local conservatives seemed horrified that Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, depicted as “anti-white racism, ” appeared on the reading list. However, such racial concerns often mixed with religious and
moral panic. Toe inclusion of The Autobiography of Malcolm X on the
approved list seemingly offended Alice Moore not because ofits frank
discussion of white supremacy but rather due to Malcolm’s giving “all
praise to Allah” that he was no longer a “brainwashed Christian.” Jack
Maurice, editor of the local newspaper, attributed the controversy to
the “renewal of the theological dispute … pitting the Fundamentalists against the Modernists … the Literalists in their interpretation of
scripture, against the Symbolists.” As opposed to traditionalism, the
modernist educators glorified, in Moore’s words, “self-actualization, ”
“clarification of their own values,” and the dangerous idea that “truth
is whatever is truth to that individual.” For the Kanawha conservatives, such relativism was a slippery slope to a host of dangerous antiTaking God’s Country Back 77
Christian ideologies. As one parent remembered: “They were teaching my kids socialism, homosexuality, and situational ethics.”13
Toe NEA sent a panel of educators to Kanawha County in December 1974 to hold hearings on the nature and scope of the protests.
Toe panel issued a final report recognizing that religious differences
moved the protestors to action. “For generations, a fundamentalist
religious belief has given meaning to the mountain way of life and has
given the mountain people the strength to withstand its hardships.”
This echoed how a national correspondent described the protests: as
“a full-scale eruption of frustrations against a worldly culture imposed
on an area literally a world apart from the rest of the country.” Though
correct about opposition to cosmopolitan ideas, the condescending
notion that such anger was isolated to a rural backwater failed to capture the growing national dissatisfaction with the increasingly secular
features of public education in the United States.
14
The movement against the secular curriculum was part and parcel
of the rising Christian Right, in part because it blended so easily with
the politics of “family values,” a new umbrella referent for concerns
about feminism, abortion, divorce, premarital sex, and gay rights. Mel
and Norma Gabler, devout Southern Baptists who converted their
small-town Texas home into a national center for exposing liberal
bias in the nation’s textbooks, said that their main concern was that
textbooks were “destroying the family” by means of so-called values
clarification. Interviewed about the West Virginia textbook brouhaha,
Mel Gabler said: “What really bugged me was that textbooks seem to
divide the children from their parents, especially the social studies
which appear to teach the child a philosophy alien to the parents.”
Such pedagogy violated the biblical mandate that parents raise their
children to be Christians. “Considering Ephesians 6:4, which tells us
to bring up our children ‘in the nurture and admonition of the Lord,'”
they asked, “can we as Christian parents entrust the education of our
children to current textbooks?” The Gablers became enormously influential. This owed in part to the fact that they lived in Texas, where
citizens were automatically granted a hearing before the state board of
education. As the Gablers became trusted fixtures at board meetings,
publishers were forced to tailor books to pass muster with them. And
�
ince Texas was one of the nation’s largest textbook purchasers, giving
1t the power to dictate to the national textbook market, the Gablers’
eological inspections had far-reaching implications. Yet their influ-
78 CHAPTER THREE
ence resulted from more than mere coincidence of geography. Their
message was convincing. And they were far from alone in their holy
war against secular schools.15
Some of the most influential evangelical writers of the 1970s, mcluding Francis Schaeffer and Tim LaHay e, placed education at the
center of their plans to redeem American culture. They contended
that the schools had been taken over by an elite who sought to spread
an anti-Christian ideology they termed “secular humanism:’ In the
religious conservative imagination, secular humanism_
re
_
placed c
�mmunism as the alien ideology most threatening to Christian America.
Rousas John Rushdoony, an evangelical intellectual who founded the
somewhat theocratic Christian Reconstructionist movement, taught
conservatives that secular humanism rationalized a blasphemous culture because it was a hubristic philosophy of “man striving to be God.”
In this way, the critique of secular humanism allowed conservatives
to make sense of previously unimaginable cultural trends, such as the
teaching of sex in the public schools. Such manifestations of cultural
decadence were the logical consequences of a society’s abandonment
of long-standing traditions rooted in biblical tenets.16
Although Christian Right rhetoric about the dangers posed by secular humanism was overstated, the United States had indeed become
a more secular nation. Proof of this was not necessarily found in the
growing number of Americans who adhered to the cr
�
ed set for� in
the 1933 Humanist Manifesto: “that the nature of the uruverse depicted
by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic
guarantees of human values.” Yes, the number of secularists, naturalists, humanists, freethinkers, and atheists increased throughout the
twentieth century, owing much to the fact that universities, secularizing institutions par excellence, bulked so large in the culture. But
the United States remained an extremely religious nation, particularly
relative to nations of comparable wealth. Gallup polls from the 1950s
through the end of the century showed that upwards of 90 percent of
Americans claimed to believe in God.
17
Twentieth-century America became more secular due not to a
lapse in the number of religious people but rather �
o a wan�g in �e
scope of religious authority. The most obvious engme of this decline
was the Supreme Court’s revolution in constitutional interpretation,,
which radically redrew the boundaries between church and state. In
its 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township, the
Taking God’s Country Back 79
court applied the First Amendment’s establishment clause to the
states. This reinterpretation of incorporation then led to a series of
cases that strengthened individual rights relative to religious or moral
authority. All of a sudden, viewing obscene material in private was legal, but organized prayer and Bible reading in school were not.
18
The paradox of American secularization-the perplexing fact that
religious authority dwindled even as the vast majority of Americans
doggedly persisted in religious belief-helps explain the culture wars.
White Protestant moral authority, which extended beyond the religious sphere for most of American history, had been put on the defensive. Conservative Christians, formerly part of the establishment,
had come to see themselves as cultural counterrevolutionaries. Foregrounding such a counterrevolution was the fact that for many conservatives, particularly white evangelicals, religion expressed a larger
national identity. Christianity was crucial to a normative framework
of Americanism. One of the primary aspirations of the Christian Right
was to reestablish, in the words of philosopher Charles Tay lor, an “understanding that used to define the nation, where being American
would once more have a connection with theism, with being ‘one nation under God,’ or at least with the ethic which was interwoven with
this.” But as Tay lor also posits, “the very embattled nature of these attempts shows how we have slid out of the old dispensation.” In other
words, the Christian Right’s emergence was predicated on a secular
shift. Its efforts to return the sacred to the realm of national politics
were in symbiosis with secularization.19
Despite the interdependent relationship between secularization
and the growth of the Religious Right, the culture wars were not only a
battle between religious and secular Americans; they were also an internal feature of American Protestantism. Some Protestant thinkers,
especially mainline Protestants, who tended to be more liberal than
their evangelical counterparts in both theology and politics, sought to
radically adjust their doctrines to the eartli-shattering epistemological implications of modernity. Conservative evangelicals, in contrast,
�sponded to the challenges of modernity with doctrinal and political
reaction. This intra-Protestant struggle played out at the 1979 Southern
Baptist Convention (SBC), where conservatives who felt threatened by modern sexual mores-feminism, abortion, and gay rights-took
�
ontrol of the SBC, to the dismay of their more moderate coreligionists. Conservatives elected as their new president Adrian Rogers, a
Bo CHAPTER THREE
Memphis pastor whose platform urged that the SBC return to the principles of “conservative, Bible-believing congregations … that believe
in the inerrant, infallible word of God.” Given that the SBC was the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the Christian Right’s political
fortunes grew rosier after the SBC’s 1979 political jump to the right.20
That evangelicals resisted some of the implications of modernity
is not to say that they did not find ways to accommodate modernity, with the qualification that accommodation did not entail agreement or, much less, wholesale adoption. The influence of evangelical
thinker Francis Schaeffer demonstrated that conservative Protestantism found ways to adjust to secular modernity and that the Christian
Right was both reactionary and often innovative. Schaeffer furnished
evangelical Christianity-despite the notorious fundamentalist insistence upon doctrinal purity-with an ecumenical spirit, at least in
its willingness to form political alliances with nonevangelical conservatives. Such an ecumenical disposition was crucial to the Christian
Right culture wars. “It is little exaggeration,” James Sire writes, with
just a touch of exaggeration, “to say that if Schaeffer had not lived,
historians of the future looking back on these decades would have to
invent him in order to explain what happened.”21
Schaeffer, the hippielike evangelical sage ofL’Abri, a Swiss mountain retreat for Christian and non-Christian wanderers alike, became
famous in the 1970s, late in his life, when his books and documentary films touched millions of American evangelicals. Growing up
in working-class Pennsylvania, Schaeffer had been “saved” at a tent
revival in 1929. His theology was shaped by the great debates of the
1920s, when his mentor J. Graham Machen was fired from Princeton
Theological Seminary for maintaining fundamentalist beliefs at a time
when liberal theologians-those who more actively reconciled their
faiths to modernist thought, including Darwinism-were on the rise.
Schaeffer attended Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, which Machen founded as a conservative alternative to the more
liberal divinity schools. He pastored a number of churches in the United
States before moving to Switzerland as a missionary in 194 7. After fundamentalist firebrand Carl McIntire astonishingly accused him of being a communist and fired him from the mission, Schaeffer and his
wife Edith founded L’Abri in 1955. Although charging Schaeffer with
communism was outrageous even by the standards of McIntire, living
in Europe had indeed led Schaeffer to reject the pietism of American
Taking God’s Country Back g1
evangelicalism and to embrace a more modern spiritualism, part and
parcel of his newfound interest in art, music, and philosophy.22
Edith Schaeffer, the child of Christian fundamentalist missionaries, was also a persuasively modernist force in her husband’s life. Toe
product of a privileged upbringing in a mission in China, Edith passionately loved high culture. But she was not always happy about the
tension inherent to being both a cultural highbrow and a Christian
fundamentalist. Her son Franky remembers his mother’s defensive
objections to H. L. Mencken’s antifundamentalist caricatures: “We’re
not like that! He would never have written those horrible things if he
had ever met me!” Franky, who ultimately rejected his parents’ theology, puts a somewhat different spin on their seemingly oxymoronic
combination of fundamentalism and high culture. “I think my father
lived with a tremendous tension,” he writes, “that pitted his growing interest in art, culture, music, and history against a stunted theology frozen in the modernist-fundamentalist battles of his youthful
Christian experience.” Rather than stunting, however, this modernistfundamentalist tension lent great significance to Schaeffer’s role: he
helped American evangelicals reconcile their fundamentalist readings
of scripture to modernity, or at least modernity shorn of modernist
epistemologies. In order to do battle with modernity, Schaeffer’s theology incorporated all that he had learned from modernist forms.
“Dad spent his life trying to somehow reconcile the angry theology
that typified movement-fundamentalism with a Christian apologetic
that was more attractive.”23
Schaeffer’s reckoning with the acids of modernity helped reshape
evangelical thought. Like early-twentieth-century evangelicals who
read Nietzsche in order to better relate their theology to modern
America, Schaeffer grappled with modernist giants in order to reinvigorate fundamentalism. He also tangled with modish artists and
musicians. “In the early ‘6os,” his son bragged, “he was probably the
only fundamentalist who had even heard of Bob Dylan.” Schaeffer’s
method-what he called his “Christian apologetic,” a system of thought
for relating the meaning of modern cultural forms to scripture-thus
gave biblical inerrancy a wider currency by certifying it for a new
generation. Of course, being conversant in countercultural music
�d not necessarily translate into eschewing that old-time religion.
Like so many other evangelical thinkers during the 1970s, including
lantankerous would-be theocrats like Rushdoony, Schaeffer had an
82 CHAPTER THREE
overarching philosophical mission to demonstrate the flaws in secular humanism, which he defined as “the system whereby men and
women, beginning absolutely by themselves, try rationally to build
out from themselves, having only Man as their integration point, to
find all knowledge, meaning and value.”24
Schaeffer believed himself to be one of the only thinkers who truly
grasped the anxieties that modernity presented people with. He theorized that Western society, by adopting secular humanism as its organizing principle, had crossed a “line of despair.” Modern people lived
in despair because they no longer knew truth; they were mired in relativism. Prior to being pushed over this precipice, everybody, even
non-Christians, could make sense of truth claims. “One could tell a
non-Christian to ‘be a good girl’ and, while she might not have followed your advice, at least she would have understood what you were
talking about,” he reasoned. “To say the same thing to a truly modern
girl today would be to make a ‘nonsense’ statement. The blank look
you might receive would not mean that your standards had been re-
. gl “25
jected, but that your message was mearun ess.
Schaeffer contended that Western civilization had become postChristian in its rejection of antithesis, a method of thought based on
the proposition that since this is absolutely true, that is absolutely untrue. Schaeffer argued that Hegel represented the first step toward
the post-Christian line of despair because Hegel theorized that synthesis, not antithesis, was the superior method of thought. Synthesis,
in Schaeffer’s reading of Hegel, implied relativism, since all acts, all
gestures, had an equal claim to truth, in that the dialectical process
would eventually envelop everything. Napoleon’s conquest of Europe
was to be judged not by the brutality of its individual acts but by the
synthesis of the “world spirit on horseback” that Hegel famously believed Napoleon signified. Furthering his eclectic intellectual history
of modernity, informed by his unique Christian apologetic, Schaeffer
wrote that existentialism announced humanity’s nihilistic trek across
the line of despair. Sartre, Schaeffer posited, believed there was no
way of knowing truth absolutely and that, given this, human existence
was ridiculous. “Nevertheless, you try to authenticate yourself by an
act of the will. It does not really matter in which direction you act as
long as you act.” An individual could choose to either help an elderly
woman walk across a street or attack her and steal her purse; in either act the person was “authenticated:’ Although this critique of exTaking God’s Country Back 83
istentialism ignored some of its key facets -namely, the unrelativistic
premise that an authenticating project was worthwhile only if it created space for more people to experience freedom -by reading existentialism against the grain of scripture, Schaeffer appealed to some
of the young, modish Americans who voraciously read Sartre. Eventually, powerful Christian conservatives sought him out precisely because of this appeal.26
Although Schaeffer presented a softer side to fundamentalism, and
although he avoided politicizing his theology until he was pressed
into serving a growing conservative Christian movement in the 1970s,
his antithesis methodology had conservative political implications.
Schaeffer made clear, for instance, that he considered homosexuality an expression of modern despair. “In much of modern thinking all
antithesis and all the order of God’s creation is to be fought againstincluding the male-female distinctions.” And yet despite the antihomosexual connotations of his theology, his son Frank describes his
father as having been decidedly unprejudiced. “Dad thought it cruel
and stupid to believe that a homosexual could change by ‘accepting
Christ.”‘ Schaeffer thought homosexuality was a sin, of course, but
a sin on par with other, less politicized sins, such as gluttony. He believed all sins could be forgiven and all sinners treated with kindness.
27
Although such parsing offered little comfort to most gays and lesbians, Schaeffer’s take on homosexuality was certainly more tolerant
than the demagogic antigay messages that other religious conservatives were preaching, particularly by the late 1970s, when opposition
to gay rights became a cardinal standpoint of the broader Christian
Right outlook. Of course ideas have consequences beyond the intentions of their authors. The modern sensibilities that Schaeffer conferred upon conservative Christianity undoubtedly attracted followers who would have otherwise remained neutral in the culture wars.
But partisan operatives who had few qualms about appearing meanspirited and bigoted also took note of how Schaeffer could be used to
their advantage.
Once Schaeffer gained a measure of American fame- once the
families of evangelical dignitaries such as Billy Graham became regular guests at L’Abri-conservative Christian leaders identified him
as the ideal conduit to a youth culture they failed to understand.
�vangelical leaders came to L’.Abri,” Franky writes, “so Dad could
teach them how to inoculate Johnny and Susie born-again against the
84 CHAPTER THREE
hedonistic out-of-control culture that had Johnny’s older brother on
drugs and Susie’s older sister marching on the capital.” After being
recruited by evangelical pitchman Billy Zeoli, who enrolled wealt�y
conservatives like Rich DeVos, the right-wing founder of Amway, m
the cause, Francis and Franky Schaeffer went into the documentary
filmmaking business. Their partnership produced a thirteen-episode
film series in 1976-How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline
oif Western Thought and Culture-which delivered Schaeffer’s wide-
. di 28
ranging Christian apologetic to enormous American au ences.
. After speaking to packed houses on a film tour across America,
the father-son tandem made another documentary film series in 1979
with help from C. Everett Koop, an ardently pro-life evangelical physician. This second series-W hatever Happened to the Human Race?­
focused on pro-life issues, especially abortion. Franky says that their
films gave “the evangelical community a frame of reference through
which to understand the secularization of American culture.” In this
way, Francis Schaeffer helped conservative evangelicals adjust to modernity by preparing them for the culture wars. His emergence as the
most influential evangelical theologian-as a formative Christian culture warrior-also served notice that the issues that aroused Ameri-
. h . 29
can conservatives were c angmg.
In the 1950s and well into the 1960s, the primary political concerns
of many white evangelicals, especially in the South, were related to
racial desegregation. Jerry Falwell, pastor of the enormous Thomas
Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, and one of the most
recognizable evangelicals due to The Old-Time Gospel Hour, a mi�stry television prog
ram that broadcast his sermons, preached agamst
religious leaders involved in civil rights activism. In his infamous 1964
sermon “Minsters and Marches,” Falwell lectured: “Preachers are not
called to be politicians, but soul winners.” He also questioned “the
sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some civil rights leaders such as
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr:’ Several evangelical churches aided massive resistance to the civil rights movement by starting Christian day
schools, where whites could send their children to avoid the federally
mandated desegregation of the public schools. Bob Jones University,
an evangelical college located in Greenville, South Carolina, forba�e
blacks from enrolling until 1971, after which it prohibited interracial
dating and marriage on the stated grounds that “cultural or biologiTaking God’s Country Back 85
cal mixing of the races is regarded as a violation of God’s command:’
Given this, it was difficult to argue with the implicit rationale that informed the IRS decision to revoke Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt
status in 1978, logic then upheld by the Supreme Court in its 1983 ruling Bob Jones University v. the United States: for many white evangelicals, Christian education was a cover for perpetuating racial segregation and discrimination. Indeed, disentangling the Christian Right’s
moral panic from white racial panic is no easy task. Even by the 1970s,
when most conservative Christians increasingly spoke about how everyone, regardless of race, was created in God’s image, racial anxieties
persisted in motivating many in their ranks. And yet there was more
to the Christian day school movement.30
Between 1965 and 1975 Christian day school enrollment grew by
over 202 percent, and by 1979 more than one million American children attended Christian schools. The timing of such precipitous g
rowth
suggests that it was a response to desegregation. Falwell’s Lynchburg
Christian Academy, for instance, opened its doors in 1967, the year
Virginia’s commissioner of education demanded proactive school
desegregation. But Falwell, seeking to distance himself from his earlier position against civil rights, never spoke in racial terms about his
school, which admitted its first black students in 1969. He, did, however, speak in religious terms, arguing that the Supreme Court’s ruling
on school prayer justified the Christian day school movement, “the
hope of this Republic.” “When a group of nine ‘idiots’ can pass a ruling
down that it is illegal to read the Bible in our public schools, they need
to be called idiots.” The Christian day school movement g
rew in the
South, but it also exploded in states far removed from the old Confederacy where desegregation was less of a concern. The California Association of Christian Schools listed 350 schools as members, including a g
rowing network of schools in San Diego run by Tim LaHaye,
who consistently made clear that his schools existed as an alternative
to secular humanist schools. Indiana Baptist school principal Robert
Billings’s widely circulated 1971 manualA Guide to the Christian School
�ed up the reason.that so many Christians were vacating the public schools: it was the “growing trend toward the secularization.” In
sum, the popularity of Christian day schools owed as much to fears
a�out the secularization of curriculum as to resistance to desegregalion, or at the very least showed that these two anxieties were not
86 CHAPTER THREE
mutually exclusive. Christian parents sent their children to Christian
schools out of a desire to have them avoid sex education, values clarification, and Darwinism, not just blacks.31
No matter the actual motivations of the Christian day school movement, in 1978 the IRS announced its intentions to enforce a 1970 law
that empowered it to revoke the tax-exempt status of private schools
proven to be racially discriminatory. Toe IRS stated that it would
prosecute those private schools that failed to make a good-faith effort to achieve student populations comprising at least s percent minorities. Conservative Christians interpreted the IRS declaration as
government persecution. W hite evangelicals in particular felt betrayed because it came under the watch of one of their own, President
Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist who had admitted during the 1976
campaign to having a “born-again” personal redemption experience.
Rather than actively seek to admit more black students in order to
comply with federal law-a difficult endeavor in any case since few African American parents were inclined to send their children to white
Christian day schools-evangelicals inundated the IRS with 120, 000
angry letters of protest. Even though the IRS prosecuted only a few
Christian day schools due to the widespread hostility its ruling provoked, Christian Right leaders attributed the politicization of evangelicals to the hazard posed by the IRS. “The IRS made us realize,” Falwell claimed, “that we had to fight for our lives.” Heritage Foundation
founder Paul Weyrich, reflecting on his efforts to bring conservative
Christians into the Republican Party fold, said he “had utterly failed”
for most of the 1970s. “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s
intervention against the Christian schools.” For religious conservatives, Carter’s IRS symbolized the federal government’s brazen disregard for their values.32
Before the IRS incited a burst of evangelical political energy, conservative anxieties about how the secular state was a menace to family values had been bubbling to the surface for years. Toe traditional
family, an idealized version of the 1950s family unit that many Americans thought to be the norm, embodied a conservative religious conception of gender roles. It encompassed one man, one woman, and
children born within the confines of this heterosexual partnership.
Whereas “scripture declares,” according to Falwell, that the husband
should “be the spiritual leader in his family,” the wife was expected to
accept her subordinate but ultimately more gratifying role as homeTaking God’s Country Back 87
maker. Add to this the fact that religious conservatives believed that the secular state impinged upon the social roles traditionally fulfilled by the family, and the fight for family values became essential to the Christian culture wars. As Falwell declared: “It is my conviction that the family is God’s basic unit in society. No wonder then, we are in a
holy war for the survival of the family.”33
Family politics were so intense during and after the 1970s because the traditional nuclear family had experienced a period of unusual sta­ bi
_
lity in the 1950s, followed by an era of unprecedented instability in the 1960s. By the 1970s, signals that the traditional family was in decline
were everywhere, such as higher rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock
pregnancy. This was the result of several factors, including economic changes associated with deindustrialization and falling wages. The decay of the historically male “blue-collar” job market, mostly factory work that tended to be well-paying and secure due to high degrees of unionization, coincided with the explosion of the historically female “pink-collar” job market, mostly service work that tended to be low­ paying, insecure, and nonunionized. Women entering the workforce in unprecedented numbers, in addition to the hardships associated with falling wages, put pressure on the traditional family model that relied upon a male breadwinner and a female caretaker.
Christian conservatives ignored such sociological explanations for the crumbling family. Instead they blamed feminists, who had indeed been critical of the sexism inherent to the traditional family well be­ fore economic transformations rendered that paradigm increasingly obsolete. As opposed to feminist solutions to family problems, which took into account the new sociological realities of the late 197os-such
as a proposal for more flexible work schedules, which would, in theory, afford working parents more time to spend with their children –
Falwell offered a streamlined solution. Men and women, he argued, needed “to get in a right relationship with God and His principles for the home,” implying that women needed to stay home and care for their children while men worked to earn the family wage. Falwell did not explain how American families might attain such an increasingly
IUDattainable objective.34
The traditional family remained at the forefront of American pol­ itics during the 1970s not only because of its dissolution but also be­ cause of the ongoing struggle to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment iERA). The historical struggle for the ERA, of course, predated the
88 CHAPTER THREE
sixties. It had been on the agenda of woman’s rights activists since
shortly after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment gave women
the right to vote in 1920. Politicians from both major parties endorsed
the ERA in the 1940s, but when it was first introduced in Congress in
1947, liberal and conservative opponents objected that it would negate legislation that endowed women with special protection.
Toe sixties feminist movement injected new life into the struggle
for the ERA. As a sign of the feminist movement’s success, both houses
of Congress passed the amendment in 1972, sending it to the states,
which were given seven years to ratify it. Thirty-eight states were required for the proposed amendment to become law, and thirty ratified
the ERA in the first year of the process. But before the final eight states
voted on ratification, a movement to stop the ERA gathered, ensuring its eventual demise. Although the amendment’s main provision –
“equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the
United States or by any State on account of sex” -sounded innocuous
enough, both proponents and opponents thought it would enlist the
federal government in the feminist movement’s goal of total equality
between the sexes. Conservatives deemed such a prospect dangerous
to the traditional family.35
Toe individual most responsible for foiling the ERA was Phyllis
Schlafly, a conservative activist from St. Louis who first made a name
for herself with her self-published bookA Choice, Not an Echo, widely
distributed in support of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for president. In September 1972, after being convinced of the need to resist the
feminist movement, Schlafly founded STOP ERA. Until then she had
focused her activism primarily on national defense issues. As a Catholic, she had not yet been attuned to the social issues that animated
evangelicals, like school prayer. By shifting gears, Schlafly brought a
large network of conservative Catholic women -those who read her
Phyllis Schlafly Report, which had in the range of thirty thousand subscribers throughout the 197os-into the majority-evangelical movement to defeat the ERA. In this, like Francis Schaeffer, she built ecumenical bridges to likeminded conservatives of different religious
faiths.
36
Schlafly’s first shot against the ERA hit its mark, in the form of a
1972 Phyllis Schlajly Report essay, “What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’
for Women?” Schlafly argued that the ERA would obliterate special.legal protections afforded to women, including the insulation provide
Taking God’s Country Back
by the traditional family, which “assures a woman the most precious
and important right of all-the right to keep her baby and be supported and protected in the enjoyment of watching her baby grow and
develop.” In this Schlafly defined the parameters of the winning campaign to defeat the ERA: if men and women were legal equals, fathers
had no obligation to provide for mothers. In other words, equal rights
for women actually meant that special rights for mothers would be revoked. Such special rights were paramount because Schlafly believed
that motherhood was a woman’s most fulfilling calling, a belief that directly challenged “women’s libbers” like Betty Friedan, who “view the
home as a prison, and the wife and mother as a slave.” Schlafly tarred
feminists as enemies of motherhood, an association that stuck.37
As resistance to the ERA grew throughout the 1970s, the ratification process stalled. Some states that had previously ratified the
amendment even reversed their votes. As it became less and less likely
that the ERA would be ratified, Schlafly’s reputation as the intellectual
force behind the movement to defeat the ERA grew. With the 1977
publication of The Power of the Positive Woman, arguably the definitive
antifeminist manifesto, her status as the nation’s most iconic antifeminist was cemented. The first step in becoming a “positive woman,” another term for a confident antifeminist in Schlafly’s vocabulary, was to
embrace the natural differences between men and women. Consistent
with such an essentialist understanding of sexual difference, Schlafly encouraged STOP ERA activists to accentuate traditional gender
roles, such as dressing particularly femininely when lobbying state legislators. To the dismay of feminists, this strategy worked to perfection.
Some of the more conservative legislators, of course, hardly needed
their paternalistic egos stroked in such a way. “To pass a law or constitutional amendment saying that we are all alike in every respect,”
argued lliinois state representative Monroe Flynn, “flies in the face of
what our Creator intended.” Conservative Christians like Flynn related feminist attempts to eliminate sexual difference to secular efforts
to erase God from the public sphere. Schlafly snidely suggested that if
feminists had a problem with sexual difference they might also have a
problem with God. “Someone, it is not clear who, perhaps God,” she
wrote, “dealt women a foul blow by making them female.”38
Schlafly’s antifeminism had a playful side to it. When addressing
,Onservative crowds, she often started in the following way: “First of
all, I want to thank my husband Fred, for letting me come-I always
90 CHAPTER THREE
like to say that, because it makes the libs so mad!” Such friskines� �as
an effective contrast to the humorless recriminations that feIIllrusts
directed her way. During a 1973 debate on the lllinois State University
campus, Friedan infamously told Schlafly: “I would like to bur� you
at the stake …. I consider y ou a traitor to your sex, an Aunt Tom. Florynce Kennedy wondered “why some people don’t hit Phyllis Schlafly
in the mouth.” Such nastiness spoke to the fact that Schlafly had come
to signify the backlash against feminism and the impending defeat of
the ERA, which feminists believed was a necessary and inevitable step
to full equality.39
Schlafly’s rhetoric, of course, could also be hard-hitting, such as
when she theorized about the ways feminism might empower an
immoral government over and against the moral family. Describing
these implications in hypothetical fashion, she wrote: “[I]f fathers ar
_
e
not expected to stay home and care for their infant children, then neither should mothers be expected to do so; and, therefore, it becomes
the duty of the government to provide kiddy-care centers to relieve
mothers of that unfair and unequal burden.” Such analysis suggested
that women’s liberationists, in their demand for total equality, wanted
to empower Washington bureaucrats to enforce social engineering
programs that would undermine the traditional family. In this Schlafly helped bring together two conservative trajectories-cultural traditionalism and antistatism-demonstrating that the culture wars,
rather than being an evasion of political-economic debates about how
power and resources were to be distributed, represented a new way
of having such debates. Exemplifying this commingling of conservative ideologies, a 1976 Phyllis Schlajly Report headline about a coming
convention on women screamed about “How the Libs and the Feds
d M ,,40
Plan to Spen Your oney.
Toe convention referenced in Schlafly’s headline, a governmentsponsored International Women’s Year (IWY) conference, became a
lightning rod for cultural conservatives. Schlafly described the 1977
Houston convention as “a front for radicals and lesbians.” Indeed,
many of those involved in organizing the IWY convention �
ere
_
outspoken feminists, thanks to Midge Costanza, who, as Car�
er s chie
_
f of
the White House’s Office of Public Liaison, was charged with appoi.ntj
ing members to the IWY Commission. Costanza desi�ate� liberal
New York congresswoman Bella Abzug-who once claimed a woman’s place is in the house, the House of Representatives ” -to chair the
Taking God’s Country Back 91
commission. Pentecostal televangelist Pat Robertson, who until then,
happy to have a fellow born-again Christian in the White House, had
sung Carter’s praises, seethed: “I wouldn’t let Bella Abzug scrub the
floors of any organization that I was head of, but Carter put her in
charge of all the women in America, and used our tax funds to support
that convention in Houston.” Costanza’s other selections, highlighted
by feminist notable Gloria Steinem, editor of Ms. magazine, did little
to inspire the confidence of religious conservatives, who organized to
gain their share of delegates to the Houston convention. After managing to secure control of only 25 percent of the delegation, Schlafly and
other conservative women decided to put on a counter-IWY conference at Houston’s Astro Arena. Their Pro-Family Rally attracted some
twenty thousand attendees.41
The IWY convention’s official platform, approved by vote of the
delegation, was decidedly left of center. Not only did it call for the
ratification of the ERA, but it also included abortion-on-demand and
gay rights planks. Toe staid feminism that had informed NOW at its
origins had given way to a more radical vision of gender equality, signaled by Friedan’s public change of heart regarding the relationship
between feminism and gay rights. In 1969 she infamously called lesbianism a “lavender herring,” charging that gay rights would tarnish
the feminist agenda. But at the 1977 Houston convention, Friedan seconded a resolution to support gay and lesbian rights, a huge symbolic
victory for the gay rights movement. Although this newly expansive
alliance illustrated the power of New Left feminist sensibilities, it also
played into the hands of religious conservatives like Schlafly, who believed the radicalism of the IWY platform signified “the death knell
of the women’s liberation movement.” “The Women’s Lib movement
has sealed its own doom,” she proclaimed, “by deliberately hanging
around its own neck the albatross of abortion, lesbianism, pornography and Federal contr.ol.”42
The national debate between feminists and the Christian Right persisted throughout the Carter administration. In the summer of 1980,
another national conference, the White House Conference on Families (WHCF), generated even more controversy. During his 1976 presidential campaign Carter had promised that, if elected, he would host
� conference on the American family, wrongly assuming that sponsormg such a conference would be politically safe. Since both liberals and
l,:>nservatives agreed the family was in crisis, he thought both sides
92 CHAPTER THREE
would be willing to convene to map out common-ground solutions.
Such faulty political logic was consistent with Carter’s antipartisan
temperament, which, against the grain of his centrist expectations,
earned him the enmity of both liberals and conservatives, both feminists and antifeminists. The disputatious Houston convention quickly
disabused Carter and his advisers of the notion that a conference on
the family would be uncontroversial. They delayed holding it for as
long as they could without reneging on his campaign promise. They
also organized it such that Carter might keep his distance: instead of
one conference in the nation’s capital, which might attract criticism at
a time when Carter had enough problems dealing with stagflation and
the Iran hostage crisis, the White House hosted three regional conferences, in Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. This strategy
failed. In an attempt to appease feminists annoyed with him for not
being an enthusiastic enough supporter of the ERA, and for stating his
personal discomfort with abortion, Carter gave his consent to a plural conference title: White House Conference on Families. Whereas
feminists believed that official recognition of the pluralistic ways an
increasing number of Americans lived would help remove the stain of
illegitimacy affixed to nontraditional families, such as those headed
by single mothers or gay couples, the Christian Right, abiding by traditional norms, defined the family in the singular and considered the
plural WHCF title an insult.43
The publicity generated by the battle over the WHCF gave conservatives an opportunity to advertise their own vision of the family,
which they presented in the form of the Family Protection Act, first
introduced in Congress in 1979 by Senator Paul Laxalt, a Nevada Republican. This proposed legislation was an effortless mix of cultural
and economic conservatism. Had it passed, for example, it would have
drastically cut government childcare services, a menace to both family values and anti tax conservatives. Among a laundry list of conservative wishes, the Family Protection Act prominently included an antiabortion provision that sought to deny Supreme Court jurisdiction to
review state laws that pertained to abortion.44
By the late 1970s, abortion had become a defining issue for the
Christian Right. But prior to Roe v. Wade, the momentous 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized most abortions ih the first two
trimesters of pregnancy on the grounds that a woman’s right to privacy included control over her pregnant body, this was not necessarily
Taking God’s Country Back 93
the case. Before it was legalized, many evangelicals, like a majority of
Americans, held nonabsolute views on abortion. Though they might
have considered a fetus a living being, they might also have believed
that a fetus’s right to life should be balanced against other considerations, including the health of the woman carrying it. fu short, prior
to Roe v. Wade many evangelicals held relativistic views about abortion: they did not support an absolute right to privacy, but neither did
they favor a fetus’s absolute right to life. Aside from a few marginalized
fundamentalists-such as far-right preacher John Rice, the longtime
editor of The Sword of the Lord, who in 1971 wrote that he “viewed the
abortion legalization campaign as the latest liberal assault on morality
in a rapidly escalating culture war” -most evangelical leaders were
ambivalent. The SBC even supported liberal abortion laws, a position it maintained until 1979, when conservatives ousted the moderate leadership.45
The movement to legalize abortion, which had been banned in
most states since 1880, had ramped up in the 1950s. Doctors led the
early push to overturn anti-abortion laws, believing their status as
professional experts granted them the authority to decide what was
best for their patients. In the 1960s some states legalized “therapeutic abortions,” those deemed necessary to protect the health of pregnant women as determined by doctors. In response, Catholics, the
only religious group consistently outspoken against the liberalization
of abortion laws, formed the nation’s first anti-abortion group in 1968,
the Right to Life League. For conservative Catholics, abortion seemed
like a clear-cut affront to the epistemological views that underpinned
their faith. They believed that the universe had an objective moral order to which humans were bound. Abortion was murder, and murder
was wrong, plain and simple. Translated into the language of conservative evangelicals, who eventually overcame their inhibitions about
joining a signature Catholic cause, abortion offended God’s will.46
Roe v. Wade forced forty-six states to liberalize their abortion laws,
leading to a national debate that compelled more Americans to take
a firm stance on the issue. Justice Harry Black.mun, who delivered
the Supreme Court’s majority opinion, recognized that the decision
was fraught with peril. In his opinion he wrote: “One’s philosophy,
one’s experiences, one’s exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one’s religious training, one’s attitude towards life and family
and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks
94 CHAPTER THREE
to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one’s thinking and
conclusions about abortion.” Blackmun was certainly right about that.
But he could not have predicted the degree to which abortion was to
be tied up with the war for the soul of America.
47
Toe day after Roe v. Wade, a small-town Minnesota evangelical
wrote a scathing letter to the editor of her local newspaper, charging
that the “diabolical” decision was “glaring evidence that our society
is decaying rapidly with moral corruption.” Christianity Today, the
most important magazine of highbrow evangelical opinion, editorialized: “Christians should accustom themselves to the thought that the
American state no longer supports, in any meaningful sense, the laws
of God, and prepare themselves spiritually for the prospect that it may
one day formally repudiate them and turn against those who seek to
live by them:’ Although most evangelical leaders were slower to respond, the Christianity Today editorial anticipated the ways in which
an emerging evangelical opposition to abortion would be framed.48
Francis Schaeffer nudged many evangelicals to oppose abortion.
Jerry Falwell credited Schaeffer for convincing him to become ardently pro-life. So too did Randall Terry, who became the nation’s
most prominent anti-abortion activist in 1986, when he founded Operation Rescue, which premised its militant tactics on the slogan “If
you believe abortion is murder, act like it’s murder.” Schaeffer saw
abortion as evidence of the humanistic disregard for life as a moral
absolute. He theorized that it was a slippery slope from abortion to
euthanasia and, more broadly, to the state’s having total authority over
decisions regarding who gets to live and who gets to die. “In regards
to the fetus, the courts have arbitrarily separated ‘aliveness’ from ‘personhood,’ and if this is so,” he asked, “why not arbitrarily do the same
with the aged?” In the 1979 pro-life film series W hatever Happened
to the Human Race? Schaeffer argued that abortion was a result of
a shift from a Christian-based society, in which each individual was
viewed as a unique creation of God, to a secular humanist society, in
which individuals were conceptualized as cogs in a larger biological
machine. Franky Schaeffer writes that his father pointed “to the ‘human life issue’ as the watershed between a ‘Christian society’ and a
utilitarian relativistic ‘post-Christian’ future stripped of compassion
and beauty.”49
Falwell, who by the end of the 1970s routinely referred to abortion
Taking God’s Country Back 95
as “murder according to the Word of God,” quoted Schaeffer extensively whenever he discussed the topic. Like Schaeffer, Falwell believed that legalized abortion represented the tragic if logical consequence of secular humanism’s negation of God. In this way Schaeffer
helped evangelicals like Falwell recognize that resistance to abortion
was of a piece with their anxieties about how a secular state was imposing its anti-Christian will on the nation. Recognizing as much complicates the simplistic view held by many political observers that abortion as a stand-alone issue pushed erstwhile Democrats into voting
for the Republican Party, which has included an anti-abortion plank
in every one of its platforms since 1980. This might have been true for
some Americans, especially for anti-abortion Catholics with historical
ties to the Democratic Party. And certainly some Republican politicians have kept abortion on the national radar in order to gain electoral advantage. For example, beginning in 1976 with Congressman
Henry Hyde from Illinois, Republicans have annually proposed riders to yearly appropriations bills-the so-called Hyde Amendmentsthat would prohibit federal funds from being used for abortion. But by
the end of the 1970s the vast majority of pro-life Americans were religious conservatives who would have voted Republican whether the
Supreme Court had legalized abortion or not. As demonstrated by the
Family Values Act, proposed and supported by many Republicans but
hardly any Democrats, the Republican Party was increasingly coming
to represent a Christian Right worldview in general. Opposition to
abortion was a paramount component of that worldview, but only one
ingredient of a more general antisecular perspective.
50
Another issue that religious conservatives felt strongly about was
the gay rights movement. The Christian Right opposed gay rights on
the grounds that homosexuality flouted the will of God as expressed
in the traditional family. When the Dade County Commission in Miami, Florida, approved an ordinance in 1977 that explicitly prohibited
discrimination against gays, religious conservatives mobilized under
the leadership of Anita Bryant, the former Miss Oklahoma and popular singer who called homosexuality “a disguised attack on God.” As
a countermeasure, Bryant helped place an anti-gay rights referendum on Dade County ballots, which succeeded in overturning the gay
ri�ts ordinance by two to one. The Dade County ordinance stipu-·
lat1on that most disturbed Bryant and her fellow conservatives was
CHAPTER THREE
96
that schools could not discriminate against gays when hiring teachers.
Concerned that gay men were more likely to be pederasts and that
they would recruit children to their “lifestyle;’ Bryant founded Save
Our children, a coalition that sought to exclude out-of-the-closet gays
hin & • 51
from the teac g pro1ession.
In 1978 California state senator John Briggs, a Bryant acolyte, introduced Proposition 6, otherwise known as the Briggs Initiative, which
would have empowered California school districts to fire “open and
notorious” gay teachers. Despite coming quickly on the heels of the
conservative triumph in Florida, the California initiative was trounced
by over one million votes. Even former governor Ronald R�
agan p
�
blicly opposed the Briggs Initiative for the reason that he did not view
homosexuality as “a contagious disease like the measles,” perhaps a
brave stance given that Reagan’s impending run for the presidency
was going to require religious conservative votes. Any joy that gay
rights activists felt as a result of such a resounding victory was crushed
three weeks later when openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey
Milk, the leader of the campaign to defeat the Briggs Initiative, was
gunned down, along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, by
a homophobic former colleague. Falwell, who had been campaigning
with Bryant against gay rights since the Dade County referendum,
deemed the Milk assassination God’s judgment. To his mind, the gay
rights movement was putting the nation itself at risk of �vine �
etribution. “Like a spiritual cancer, homosexuality spread until the city of
Sodom was destroyed. Can we believe that God will spare the United
. . d•”S2
States if homosexuality contmues to sprea
Tim LaHaye wrote a number of popular books in the 1970s and
19sos that provided readers with a framework for understanding
secular humanism in relation to issues like the family, marriage, and
schooling. One such book, The Unhappy Gays, an unsympathetic polemic against homosexuality, was published a few months befor
,
� the
vote on the Briggs Initiative, which LaHaye saw as necessary to protect school children from being taught perverted sex by a homosexual.” He and his wife Beverly had relocated to San Diego in 1956 from
the South where LaHaye had been a pastor since earning his bachelor’s de;ee from Bob Jones University. In Southern California th_
e
consequences of the sexual revolution, such as casual sex and ea
_
sy divorce were more out in the open than virtually anywhere else m the
natio�. And yet a large contingent of religious conservatives also lived
Taking God’s Country Back 97
in Southern California, generating a productive friction that situated
the LaHayes at the forefront of resistance to cultural radicalism.
53
The thesis LaHaye laid out in The Unhappy Gays, as the title suggests, was that “homosexuals are unquestionably more miserable
than straight people.” LaHaye argued that the word gay was a deceitful “propaganda word” when used as a synonym for homosexuality,
citing liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. for support. In a 1977
Time magazine article, “The State of Language,” Schlesinger wrote the
following passage, subsequently quoted by LaHaye: “Gay used to be
one of the most agreeable words in the language. Its appropriation by
a notably morose group is an act of piracy.” LaHaye presented a list of
reasons why “gay isn’t gay,” including that gay men suffered unusually
high rates of depression, drug use, and suicide. In this he ignored the
likelihood that the cultural stigma attached to homosexuality, which
manifested in myriad forms of discrimination, was the actual cause of
their unhappiness. But LaHaye’s objective was not to cure discrimination. Like so many other evangelicals, LaHaye believed that committing oneself to Christianity, which affirmed heterosexuality as God’s
will, was the only path to personal redemption. In other words, belief
in Christ was the cure to homosexuality. In this LaHaye matter-offactly denied that homosexuality was occurring naturally. “No one,”
he wrote, “is born homosexual.”54
.
Homosexuality was a key theme in right-wing jeremiads of that age.
Like Falwell and most evangelical leaders, LaHaye believed that given
social space to thrive, homosexuality would be the death of America.
LaHaye introduced The Unhappy Gays with a fable about a trip he and
Beverly took to Italy, where a guide told them that a public bath at
the ruins of Pompeii was “for men only.” Mentally comparing that to
the public baths frequented by gay men in American cities like New
York and San Francisco, he wrote: “No wonder Gibbon concluded
that homosexuality w;s one of the moral sins that contributed to the
decline of the Roman Empire.” In the same ways that they pointed
to Engel v. Vitale as the beginning of American decline, conservative Christians often alluded to Edward Gibbon’s classic eighteenthce�
tury book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
which on their reading explained Rome’s collapse as the result of sexual depravity, in order to prophesy the downfall of American civili2:ation. “A homosexually lenient society,” LaHaye warned, “will incur
the wrath of God.” Whereas America was once great because it was a
CHAPTER THREE
society based on biblical principles, “when sodomy fills the national
cup of man’s abominations to overflowing, God earmarks that nation
for destruction.”55
As opposed to those who had a more secular interpretation of
American history-including most academic historians-religious
conservatives held that America was founded as a Christian nation.
For the Christian Right, the belief that the United States was the product of divine creation explained American exceptionalism. “I believe
that God promoted America to a greatness no other nation has enjoyed,” Falwell preached, “because her heritage is one of a republic
governed by laws predicated on the Bible.” Beyond explaining national greatness, the narrative of America’s heavenly origins was also
important to Christian culture warriors because it undergirded their
critique of secularization by drawing a clear boundary between the
nation’s glorious past and its degraded present. “Either we will return
to the moral integrity and original dreams of the founders of this nation,” Pat Robertson cautioned, “or we will give ourselves over more
and more to hedonism, to all forms of destructive anti-social behavior,
to political apathy, and ultimately to the forces of anarchy and disintegration that have throughout history gripped great empires and nations in their tragic and declining years.” Historian Donald Critchlow
points out that this Christian Right “moral sensibility” about the nation and its history was rooted in the assumption “that free government rested upon a moral or religious citizenry whose principal civil
responsibility was the protection of virtue. The sensibility upheld the
belief that ultimately republican government rested on moral foundations that, if eroded, would lead to the collapse of the polity.”56
Given the mobilization of religious conservatives during the 1970s,
and given the biblical inspiration upon which their triumphant nationalism rested, the Christian Right’s enthusiastic embrace of Ronald
Reagan’s 1980 presidential candidacy should not have been surprising.
It was Reagan, after all, who famously described the United States as
a “city on a hill,” a metaphor he borrowed from John Winthrop, who
borrowed it from Jesus. It was Reagan, not his evangelical opponent
Jimmy Carter, who attended James Robison’s 1980 Religious Roundtable in Dallas, where he knowingly told the gathering of adoring
evangelicals: “You can’t endorse me, but I endorse you.” It was Reagan who promised to reinstate school prayer, who campaigned to end
the alleged IRS persecution of Christian schools, who advocated for
Taking God’s Country Back 99
the teaching of creationism, saying that evolution was “theory only,”
and who vowed to overturn Roe v. Wade, avowing deep regret about
his earlier support for pro-choice legislation. It was Reagan who said:
“The First Amendment was written not to protect the people and
their laws from religious values, but to protect those values from government tyranny.”57
Reagan should hardly have been theologically palatable to white
evangelicals: despite dabbling in premillennial dispensationalism, a
distinctive Christian fundamentalist eschatology in which adherents
sought to decode signs of the coming rapture, he also showed interest
in Baha’i, astrology, and the Shroud of Turin. As one Carter supporter
bitterly pointed out, Reagan was “a Hollywood libertine, had a child
conceived out of wedlock before he and Nancy married, admitted to
drug use during his Hollywood years, and according to Henry Steele
Commager, was one of the least religious presidents in American history.” Yet Reagan won nearly 75 percent of white evangelical voters in
1980-and this should not have puzzled anyone. By unambiguously
aligning himself with Christian Right efforts to take God’s country
back, Reagan won over conservative evangelicals less interested in
his theology or his personal history than in his politics.58
Winning over the Christian Right in 1980 was a big deal. In response to developments that they believed imperiled the nationsecularization, feminism, abortion, gay rights-religious conservatives intensified their involvement in political activism. Evangelical
leaders told their congregants that it was their duty to inject their religious beliefs into the political sphere. Falwell, in an apparent reversal
of his earlier claim that preachers should not participate in the civil
rights movement because it was not the role God had called them
to, proclaimed: “This idea of ‘religion and politics don’t mix’ was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own coun­
�-” Tapp�
d by
_
well-connected Republican operatives Paul Weyrich,
��
hard V1guene, and Hc,ward Phillips, Falwell founded Moral Majority m 1979 as part of a larger effort to bring religious conservatives into
a powerful new political alliance. Falwell justified the need for Moral
Majority by arguing that Christian fundamentalists like himself had
more in common with similarly orthodox Jews and Catholics “than
we ever will with the secularizers of this country. It is time for all religious!� committed citizens to unite against our common enemy.”59
Despite such ecumenical rhetoric, the vast majority of Moral
—
100 CHAPTER THREE
Majority members were evangelicals. Other than abortion, its core
issues were evangelical concerns such as opposition to feminism, gay
rights, pornography, and the teaching of evolution. Nonevangelical
conservatives were welcome in Moral Majority: indeed, Catholics
purportedly constituted nearly 30 percent of the membership at the
peak of its influence in the early 1980s. But Moral Majority was immediately powerful because there was an obvious need for a political
organization that would act as a vehicle for white evangelical causes.
In its first year it enrolled 2.5 inillion mostly evangelical members and
reported contributions in excess of $35 million. Moral Majority’s influence increased after it was deemed to have been crucial to Reagan’s
victory. In the immediate aftermath of the election, one prominent
headline read: “The Preachers Gave It to Reagan.” Such press fed into
Christian Right hyperbole, as Falwell claimed Moral Majority was the
main reason Reagan got elected. Liberals reacted to the 1980 election
results similarly, if from a different evaluative perspective. They fretted about an impending theocracy, comparing the Christian Right to
Iranian fundamentalists who had taken American hostages, and often
called Falwell the American Ayatollah.60
Claims about the importance of newly energized evangelicals were
only half true. They ignored that even before 1980, conservative evangelicals had often organized effectively behind conservative politicians. The lnistake is repeated often by historians, who tend to argue
that 1980 represented the reemergence of conservative Christians in a
political sphere they had deserted after the huiniliation of the Scopes
Monkey Trial. Nixon’s 1972 reelection serves as an instructive counterexample. Neoconservatives believed Nixon’s landslide represented
the will of urban ethnic whites like themselves who had grown weary
of a New Left they believed was dictating the McGovern campaign.
Such an account, though not entirely false, ignored that the key to
Nixon’s victory was winning over evangelicals. Nixon did better with
urban white ethnics than any Republican since the early twentieth
century, thanks largely to organized labor’s lack of enthusiasm for McGovern. But a startlingly high 84 percent of white evangelicals voted
for Nixon in 1972. The Nixon campaign was nothing if not smart about
demographic trends. The Sunbelt states were becoming incre�singly
populous, and evangelicals were the fastest-growing population in
those states. By the early 1970s the ten largest churches in the nation,
all evangelical, were located in the southern and western parts of the
Taking God’s Country Back 101
country. With this in mind, Nixon exploited issues that drew them to the voting booths. For instance, he leaked news that he had or­ dered Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth’s novel about masturbation removed from the White House library.61
Neoconservatives-the intellectual spokespeople for urban white ethnics-might have innovated much of the logic that informed the conservative side of the culture wars, particularly in relation to late­ twentieth-century racial discourse. But the Christian Right formed the demographic bedrock of the conservative culture wars. Because of this, the war for the soul of America was as much a religious struggle between people of incompatible faiths-conservative Christians and
se�
ular liberals-as it was a fight over the nation’s ethnic and racial legac1es. Of course these two distinct battle lines often overlapped in the 1980s and 1990s, giving the culture wars narrative its valence.
306 NOTES TO PAGES 60-68
41. Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean
Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). Kenneth
Clark, Prejudice and Your Child (Boston: Beacon, 1955); Kenneth Clark, Dark
Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 131.
42. Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools
(New York: Basic Books, 1974), 251-380.
43. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes,
Puerto Ricans,Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1963). Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan,
1909), 139, quoted by David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2ou), 206.
44. The teacher’s discussion question and the unsigned letter are quoted in Podair,
Strike That Changed New York, 58, 124. The anti-Semitic poem is quoted in Gerson,
Neoconservative Vision, 159.
45. The Carmichael quote is in Ben Carson, “Stokely Carmichael,” inAfricanAmerican
Lives, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham ( Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004); Nathan Glazer, “Blacks,Jews and Intellectuals,” Commentary, April 1969. “Podhoretz on Intellectuals,” Manhattan Tribune, February 1, 1969,
4. Harnett and Young are quoted in Podair, Strike That Changed New York, 131,126.
46. Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Blacks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 216-17.
47. Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race,
Rights, and Taxes on America Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 31.
48. Nathan Glazer, “Is Busing Necessary?” Commentary, March 1972, 50. J. Anthony
Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York: Vintage Books, 1985). Matthew Richer, “Boston’s Busing Massacre,” Policy Review, November 1, 1998.
49. James Q Wilson, “Crime and the Liberal Audience,” Commentary, January 1971,
71-78.
50. Ibid., 77.
51. David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, 10th anniversary
ed. (orig. 1995; New York: Basic Books, 2005), 177; Heilbrunn, They Knew They
Were Right, 14.
52. Historians of neoconservatism tend to ignore Midge Deeter. Ronnie Grinberg
serves as a useful corrective: “Jewish Intellectuals, Masculinity, and the Making of
Modern American Conservatism, 1930-1980 ” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2010 ). Jeffers, Norman Podhoretz, 207. Midge Deeter, The Liberated Woman
and Other Americans (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghehan, 1971), and
The New Chastity and Other Arguments against Women’s Liberation (orig. 1972;
New York: Capricorn Books, 1974).
53. Deeter, New Chastity, 43.
54. Deeter, Liberated Woman and Other Americans, 12.
55. For Bell’s self label, see his The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 20th anniversary ed. (orig. 1976; New York: Basic Books, 1996), xi. Daniel Bell, “Sensibility
NOTES TO PAGES 69-74 307
in tbe 6o’s,” Commentary, June 1971, 63. Midge Deeter, “Boys on tbe Beach,” Commentary, September 1980, 38.
56. Gore Vidal, “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” in The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal,
ed. Jay Parini (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 343,345,341 (originally published in
The Nation, November 14, 1981).
57. George Nash, Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conservatism (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009), 243-44.
CHAPTER THREE
1. Irving Kristo!, “What Is a Neoconservative?,” in The Neoconservative Persuasion:
Selected Essays, 1942-2009, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (New York: Basic Books,
2011), 149.
2. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen analyzes how Americans have come to grips with
modernity through reading Nietzsche, who made famous the “God is dead ” utterance. American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2012).
3, George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping ofTwentiethCentury Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 ).
4, James Davison Hunter pointed out that religious Americans gave up their sectarian
prejudices in order to form political and ideological alliances in the culture wars
in his now classic book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York:
Basic Books, 1991).
5. Leo Ribuffo, “Family Policy Past as Prologue: Jimmy Carter, the White House
Conference on Families, and the Mobilization of the New Christian Right,” Review
of Policy Research 23, no. 2 (2006): 311-37. Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life
of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). Marshner quote is
found in William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in
America (New York: Broadway Books, 1996), 182.
6. Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the American School: Progressivism in
American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). John Dewey,
Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New
York: Macmillan, 1916). Adam Laats, Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes
Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of America’s Culture Wars (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010 ). Mencken’s quote is found in Richard T. Hughes, Christian
America and the Kingdom of God (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 137.
7. Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 66-78. Andrew Hartman, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008).
8. Bruce J. Dierenfield, The Battle over School Prayer: How “Engel v. Vitale” Changed
America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007). For the conservative response to Engel, see Christopher Hickman, The Most Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court and Its Critics in the Warren Court Era (PhD diss., George Washington
University, 2010); the Buckley passage is quoted on p. 1.
308 NOTES TO PAGES 75-79
9. Ronald W. Evans, The Social Studies Wars: What Should We Teach the Children?
(New York: Teachers College Press, 2004). The NEA advocacy of inquiry learning is found in Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence (hereafter Wilcox
Collection), Eagle Forum, Folder 4. The Helms letter is quoted in Joanne Omang,
‘”New Right’ Figure Sees McCarthyism in NEA’s Conference on Conservatism,”
Washington Post, February 24, 1979, found in National Education Association Records, Special Collections Research Center, Gelman Library, the George Washington University, Washington, DC (hereafter NEA Papers), Box 2128, Folder 9.
10. Martin, With God on Our Side, 102-16. Jeffrey P. Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000).
11. First Hargis quote is found in Moran, Teaching Sex, 183. For others: Wilcox Collection, Billy James Hargis Folder 3: Letters, 1967-1969.
12. Trey Key, “The Great Textbook War,” West Virginia Public Radio, October 31,
2009. The “shot heard” and Marshner quotes are from the broadcast transcript.
Carol Mason, Reading Appalachia from Left to Right: Conservatives and the 1974
Kanawha County Textbook Controversy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2009); William H. Denman, “‘Them Dirty, Filthy Books’: The Textbook War in
West Virginia,” in Free Speech Yearbook 1976, ed. Greg Phipher (Falls Church, VA:
Free Speech Association, 1976), 42-50; and Ann L. Page and Donald A. Clelland,
“The Kanawha County Textbook Controversy: A Study of the Politics ofLife Style
Concern,” Social Forces 57, no. 1 (September 1978).
13. Most of these quotes can be found in “The Great Textbook War” radio transcripts.
The Jack Maurice quote is found in the NEA Archives, Box 2162, Folder 1. The
pamphlet passage is from Martin, With God on Our Side, 122.
14. NEA Archives, Box 2161, Folders 4-8: “Inquiry Report: Kanawha County, West
Virginia: A Textbook Study in Cultural Conflict” (NEA Teacher Rights Division,
Washington DC, 1975). The national correspondent was Russell Gibbons, writing
in Commonweal, found in Denman, “Them Dirty, Filthy Books,” 44,
15. J. Brooks Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). Wilcox Collection, Mel
and Norma Gabler, Folders 1 and 2. Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 83-85. Jimmy
Brown, “Textbook Reviewing Is No Small Readout,” Gladewater Mirror, July 28,
1974, 1, 11.
16. Williams, God’s Own Party, 134-3 7. Rousas John Rushdoony, The Messianic Character of Education (Nutley, NJ: Craig, 1963), and Man Striving to Be God (Fenton,
MI: Mott Media, 1982).
17. Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
18. Mark Chaves, “Secularization as Declining Religious Authority,” Social Forces 72,
no. 3 (1994): 749-74.
19. David Sehat shows that the separation of church and state was more abstract than
20.
NOTES TO PAGES 80-8 7 309
real in American life prior to the postwar era: The Myth of American Religions Freedom ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Charles Taylor, A Secular Age ( Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 488.
David A. Hollinger, “The Accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the
Enlightenment: An Old Drama Still Being Enacted,” D(l!dalus 141, no. 1 (Wmter
2012): 76-88. On the SBC convention, see Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of
the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 212. On the importance of the SBC to
Christian Right political power, see Williams, God’s Own Party, 6.
21. James Sire, foreword to Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (orig. 1968;
Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 15.
22. Barry Hankins, Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America ( Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008).
23. See Frank Schaeffer’s illuminating apostate memoir, Crazy for God: How I Grew
Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All ( or
Almost All) of It Back (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2007), 15, 116.
24.
25.
26.
For the reception of Nietzsche, see Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche.
Schaeffer, Crazy for God, 118. Schaeffer, God Who Is There, 29-30.
Schaeffer, God Who Is There, 2 7.
Ibid., 32-38.
27. Ibid., 57; Schaeffer, Crazy for God, 77.
28. Schaeffer, Crazy for God, 271-73.
29. Ibid. Williams, God’s Own Party, 141.
30. For quotes from Falwell’s “Minsters and Marches” speech, see Lee Edwards, The
Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America (New York: Free
Press, 1999 ), 198. Bob Jones University v. the United States 461 U.S. 574 (1983), n. 6.
Terry Sanford and David Nevin, The Schools That Fear Built: Segregationist Academies in the South (New York: Acropolis Books, 1976). For a recent argument that
Christian day schools were mostly segregation by other means, see Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 248-51.
31. William J. Reese, “Soldiers for Christ in the Army of God: The Christian School
Movement,” in History, Education, and the Schools (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), m-33. The Falwell quote, as well as the figures on Christian day school
growth, is found in Williams, God’s Own Party, 85. Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the
Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to Our Children (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H.
Revell, 1983). Robert J. Billings, A Guide to the Christian School (Hammond, IN:
Hyles-Anderson, 1971), 12.
32. Falwell and Weyrich quotes are from Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 17, 199.
33, Ribuffo, “Family Policy Past as Prologue.” For the first Falwell quote: Jerry Falwell,
Listen, America! (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 128. For the second: Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 56.
34, Robert 0. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the
1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 309-38. Falwell, Listen, America!, 128.
310 NOTES TO PAGES 8 8-97
35. Sharon Whitney, The Equal Rights Amendment: The History and the Movement
(New York: F. Watts, 1984).
36. Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 212-42.
37. Phyllis Schlafly, “What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?” Phyllis Schlajly
Report, May 1972. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots Conservatism, 217-18.
38. Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington
House, 1977), 11-12. Monroe Flynn’s quote is in Critchlow, Phyllis Schlajly and
Grassroots Conservatism, 226.
39. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots Conservatism, 247, 12, 227.
Schlafly, Power of the Positive Woman, 21. Self, All in the Family, 313.
41. Schlafly quote is in Critchlow, Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots Conservatism, 245.
Robertson quote is in Flippen,]immy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise
40.
42.
of the Religious Right, 121.
Marjorie J. Spruill, “Gender and America’s Right Turn,” in Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 71-89. “Betty Friedan,” in
JoAnn Meyers, The A to z of the Lesbian Liberation Movement: Still the Rage (New
York: Scarecrow, 2009 ), 122. Schlafly’s first quote: Flippen,]immy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 149; second quote: Critchlow,
Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots Conservatism, 247-48.
43. Ribuffo, “Family Policy Past as Prologue.”
“The Family Protection Act,” H.R. 7955, 96th Congress (1979). 44.
45. Daniel K. Williams, “No Happy Medium: The Role of Americans’ Ambivalent
View of Fetal Rights in Political Conflict over Abortion Legalization,” Journal of
Policy History 25, no. 1 (2013): 42-61. The Rice passage is quoted in Williams, God’s
Own Party, 116.
46. For conservative Catholic philosophical underpinnings and how they related to
abortion, see PatrickAllitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics inAmerica, 1950-1985 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).
47. Harry A. Blackmun Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter: Blackmun Papers), Box 151, Folder 2.
48. Blackmun Papers, Folder 10. The Christianity Today editorial is quoted in Williams, God’s Own Party, 119.
49. Williams, God’s Own Party, 141-55. Schaeffer, Crazy for God, 273.
50. Falwell, Listen, America!, 173.
51. Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right,
136-38.
52. Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk
(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1988). Falwell is quoted in Williams, God’s Own
Party, 152.
53. Williams, God’s Own Party, 73, 152.
54. Tim LaHaye, The Unhappy Gays: What Everyone Should Know about Homosexuality (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1978), 41, 62.
NOTES TO PAGES 98-105 311
55. Ibid., 201-2.
56. Falwell, Listen, America!, 16. Robertson is quoted in James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 112-13.
Critchlow, Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots Conservatism, 8.
57. William E. Pemberton, Exit with Honor: The Life and Presidency of Ronald Reagan
(New York: M. E. Sharp, 1998).
58. Carter supporter is quoted in Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and
the Rise of the Religious Right, 319.
59. Martin, With God on Our Side, 191-220.
60. Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 315.
61. One of the central revisions that Daniel Williams makes in God’s Own Party is that
the Christian Right did not emerge whole cloth in the 1970s, but rather that it was
a movement fifty years in the making. The anecdote about Nixon and Portnoy’s
Complaint is found in Courtwright, No Right Tum, 76.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: New American Library,
Inc, 1903), 19. Frederick Douglass, “The Color Line,” NorthAmericanReview, 1881.
Ralph Ellison, “What America Would Be Like without Blacks,” Time, April 6,
1970. The historiography of how immigrants became white is rich. Two good examples: David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became
White (New York: Routledge, 1995). On the “one drop” rule, see David Hollinger,
Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional
Affiliation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006),
especially chap. 2, “The One Drop Rule and the One Hate Rule.”
2. Robin]. Anderson, “Dynamics of Economic Well-Being,” in Household Economic
Studies (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2011). “Home Ownership Rates by
Race and Ethnicity of Householder, 1994-2010,” in Housing Vacancies and Homeownership: Annual Statistics 2010 (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2011).
Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (New York: Random House, 2005). Michelle Alexander, The New
Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press,
2010 ). Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ( orig. 1852; Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1937).
3. Terry Anderson, The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action ( Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004), 71. K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color
Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1996), 125.
4. Anderson, Pursuit of Fairness, 108-28. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action
Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).
5. Bunzel, “Black Studies at San Francisco State,” 36. Blackmun Papers, Box 260,
Folder 7: Syllabus, University of California Regents v. Bakke, p. II.

A CULTURE
DIVIDED
America’s Struggle for Unity
DAVID TREND
Paradigm Publishers
Boulder • London
A�tifURE DIVIDED
btiltural conformity. Indeed, to some theorists such an obsession with
an articulated “common culture” has become synonymous with the
integrity of national identity itself In this context then, the form of
democracy we now face becomes “radical” in at least two senses of
the term. Not only does it imply a fundamental rejection of monolithic party politics in favor of broader models based on identity
groupings, but it also suggests the rejection of a set of national
accords seen by many to constitute the very glue that holds. the
nation together. These two factors make possible the type of new
spaces for engagement and new definitions of citizenship that radical
democracy implies.
In other writings I have sought to delineate the problems produced by the binary epistemology of Enlightenment humanism
across a range of disciplinary fields: photography, film, television,
education, music, and new media.18
The roots of this enlightenment model are perhaps nowhere more
dearly articulated than in philosopher George W. F. Hegel’s phenomenology, which mapped out a basic theory subject/object relations. Hegel postulated an abstract dyad of the self and other,
constructed in the consciousness of individuals. Within this idealized
rendering, the subject envisions an external object that it comes to
recognize as different from itsel£ This difference produces a dissatisfaction that prompts the subject to absorb the attributes of the external other. He termed this process “sublation.”19 According to Hegel,
sublation was the motor force of human learning, as the subject is
changed through the appropriatipn of new ideas and objects. What is
important to remember is that this dialectic was a pure function of
metaphysics. Although Hegel’s fundamental subject/object dualism
was replicated for many decades in western philosophies and institutions, it was not a model of the world–as contemporary feminist,
poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories have made dear. Indeed,
it is now increasingly evident that it is less productive to view social
relations in binary “either/or” terms than in multiple “ands.”
CHAPTER THREE
Belief
Faith in What?
I N THE 2000s the topic of values reemerged in public discourse as
a point of contention between liberals and conservatives, as well as
a rallying call for moral absolutists. The values debate has emerged
most strongly in debates over “good” and “evil” in people’s lives and
on the international stage. In the 2000 presidential race, George W.
Bush ran on a platform of moral platitudes, echoed in his victory
speech by imploring Americans to vanquish “evil” from the world
and “teach our children values.”1 While President Barack Obama has
expressed his values in more nuanced terms, Obama’ s appeals for
dialogue, tolerance, and responsibility convey a distinct moral program. All political agendas implicitly convey definitions of “right”
and “wrong,” imploring citizens to accept one set of such definitions
over others. Framing issues of right and wrong in terms of good and
evil intensifies the rhetoric of the discussion, evoking a heightened
emotionalism and sometimes the specter of impending threat.
Throughout American history the nation’s enemies frequently
have been portrayed as evil-and such characterizations often have
underpinned rationales for military action and war. Franklin Roosevelt led the United States into World War II for the purpose of
fighting a great “evil.” Ronald Reagan called America’s Cold War
enemies “the focus of evil in the world.” 2 This rhetoric again went
into high gear following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when
President Bush labeled Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an “axis of
evil.” It would be easy to dismiss these remarks as simple political
55
56 A CULTURE DIVIDED
posturing, lest we forget that George Bush won the presidency
twice and Republicans gained the support of many in other elections. The language of good and evil resonates powerfully in the
minds of voters because such concepts are deeply ingrained in public consciousness.
Concepts of good and evil are fundamental to Western philosophy, dating to pre-Socratic times. In both Eastern and Western philosophy, these ideas are found at least as early as 500 BCE. The
philosophies of Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, and the subsequent doctrines of Christianity all hinged on a fundamental dualism
between the good or “the way” and evil or “falseness.” Indeed, organized religion has functioned as an important institution of moral
education throughout history. It has guided civilizations in their pursuits of peace as well as war. In some systems, goodness is seen as the
natural state of humankind, with evil entering as an aberration. In
the biblical account of the creation of humanity, Adam and Eve are
initially innocent, existing in a sort of blissful ignorance. A serpent
appears who convinces the pair to disobey God and consume fruit
from the tree of knowledge, saying, “Eat thereof, then your eyes shall
be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”3 Thus
Adam and Eve begin their encounters with sin. In some systems,
good and evil are transposed with notions of truth and falseness.
Socrates is remembered for his belief that certain great truths exist
and humanity’s task is to understand them. Plato, regarded by many
as the most influential figure in Western philosophy, asserted that
values such as absolute beauty and goodness exist in “ideal forms”
that people can never truly lmow, but they can experience through
copies manifest in things seen in the world. Unlike Socrates, who
believed in many truths, Plato argued that there exists one basic
truth-“the good” -to which people should aspire. Because the
world we experience is but a realm of copies of “goodness,” these
copies render understandings that are always imperfect and can
sometimes be evil.
Some psychologists argue that concepts of good and evil are hardwired into our brains. George Lakoff writes that such values are part
of the basic architecture of thinking manifest in early childhood. In
Lakoff’s view, much of the way we think is organized by “deep
frames” or fundamental concepts in the unconscious, which we
BELIEF 57
develop through repeated exposure to ideas. Deep frames “structure
how you view the world,” Lakoff explains.4 They characterize the
moral and political principles that are so deep they are part of our
very identities. “Deep framing is the conceptual infrastructure of the
mind: the foundation, walls, and beams of that edifice.”5 The surface
thinking that goes with everyday experience, conversation, and
media are effective to the extent they fit only within deep frames.
Owing to their centrality in human belief systems, concepts of
good and evil have functioned as central elements in storytelling
throughout history. Ancient myths, prehistoric renderings, early literature, and religious writings all depend on the simple opposition of
good and evil in creating dramatic tension and conveying meaningful narratives. Most fairy tales and children’s stories hinge on a
simple opposition of good and evil values. Characters encounter evil
witches, giants, or monsters. Peter Pan fought Captain Hook, Harry
Potter battled Voldemort, and Superman faced dozens of bad guys. It
doesn’t take much insight to recognize the transparent moralizing in
myths and children’s stories. Most of these narratives function both
to entertain and to instruct. This is because the stories always come
from adults who see them as a vehicle for instilling values in children.
As Jack Zipes writes, “There never has been a literature conceived by
children for children, a literature that belongs to children.”6 Zipes
points that children, when left to their own devices, often do not create stories of menacing bad guys who are overcome by virtuous figures. Instead they recreate other forms of play in their narratives.
Keep in mind that children not only don’t write most children’s stories, but they also don’t frequently select and purchase the books,
CDs, or videos. The choices come from the well-intentioned adults
who make the decisions for children and hence create the cultural
realm their children inhabit.
The moralizing in children’s culture helps create a good versus
bad worldview that sets the stage for a binary understanding of the
world. But it would be a mistake to attribute this black-and-white
worldview to fairy tales alone. Underlying this binary worldview are
deeper philosophical structures that undergird human consciousness
itself Before the Western enlightenment that emerged at the end of
the Middle Ages, the opposition of life and death was manifest in the
dualism between God and humankind, between heaven and earth,
58 A CULTURE DIVIDED
expressed in human experience in the division of man and woman.
Plato wrote of the opposition of the corporeal and the spiritual. In
the 1500s Nicolas Copernicus and Francis Bacon drew distinctions
between science (fact) and religion (belief). Two centuries later Rene
Descartes formulated his famous mind/body dualism, writing that
“the mind is completely distinct from the body: to wit, that matter,
whose essence is extension in space, is always divisible, whereas the
mind is utterly indivisible.”7 Later philosophers parsed the various
kinds of realities and images that the mind could formulate, as distinctions were drawn between perception and imagination, reason
and emotion. Dualism could not have grown to such a large concept
if it did have a use and importance. From early childhood through
adulthood, the concept of opposing ideas, concepts, and values
forms the basis of people’s ability to see difference, draw distinctions,
and engage in critical thought. It underlies legality and illegality,
knowledge and ignorance, progress and the lack thereof Many see
dualism as the essence of humanity and human thought.
But dualism has in fact been the rascal of human consciousness.
Its apparent ubiquity and universal applicability have led people and
civilizations to believe it is the only way of viewing the world. To
many people, knowing the difference between good and bad is the
very essence of traditionalism that passes ethical values from genera�
tion to generation. Inabilities to make clear, black-and-white distinctions in decision making and assigning value often have been seen as
failures in judgment, insight, conviction, even courage. Knowing the
difference between right and wrong is viewed by many as an essential
element of adult consciousness and civilized society. What this traditionalist perspective fails to realize is that duality is in fact but one
way of viewing the world. It is in many ways an abstraction or even a
fiction conceived about existence. There are many degrees of value
that lie between truth and untruth. There are many shades of morality and immorality between good and evil, just as there are many
kinds of people. Admitting the shades of light and dark that exist
between black-and-white distinctions obviously requires a more
complex thought process, one that recognizes ambiguity and partial
answers to questions. President Bill Clinton was criticized by political conservatives for his resistance to dogmatic beliefs, and his presidency even was termed a “gray era” for this reason.
BELIEF 59
But in the post-Bush years, shades of gray seem to be making a
comeback. Recent elections have shown both Democrats and Republicans stepping over each other in efforts to stake out centrist positions, keeping voters nearly evenly divided in many races. Media
critics have noted the decline of traditional “good” and “bad” characters in TV and movies, and the rising popularity of “antiheroes.”
Most frequently cited is the family man and mafia kingpin at the
center of the long-running cable series, The Sopranos. Viewers never
could decide whether to love or hate Tony, who strangled another
mobster while touring colleges with his daughter. Jack Bauer of 24,
Don Draper of Mad Men, Patty Hewes of Damages, and Dexter
Morgan of Dexter all manifest similar blends of heroism and selfishness, virtue and dishonesty. Joshua Alston wrote that the Bush presidency “primed audiences for antihero worship, that in the midst of a
war started with faulty intelligence, suspected terrorists sent to black
sites and a domestic eavesdropping program, it’s no wonder we
would be interested in delving deeply into the true motives underlying the actions of powerful people. ”
8 Is this emerging pattern in
media preferences evidence of changing public attitudes-perhaps a
new moment in American consciousness–or simply another pendulum swing in popular taste?
Absolutism and Relativism
“Absolutism” is the belief that there are concrete standards against
which moral questions can be judged, and that certain actions are
right or wrong, regardless of the context in which they occur. Absolutism is often contrasted with moral “relativism,” which asserts that
moral truths are contingent upon social or historical circumstances.
Absolutists believe that morals are inherent in the laws of the universe, the nature of humanity, or the will of God. From this perspective, all actions can be evaluated as either inherently moral or
immoral. For example, an unprovoked war might be deemed a moral
act by an absolutist.
Relativists eschew absolute black-and-white answers to questions.
Rather than applying a fixed set of good or bad definitions that
always apply in judgments, relativists often argue that new answers to
questions must be created for every situation. What is true in one
60 A CULTURE DIVIDED
situation might not be true in another. For example, an absolutist
view of the family might say that only conventional nuclear families,
gender roles, and childrearing practices are universally valid, and that
single-parent families, working mothers, or extended family models
aren’t good. A relativist approach would say that different kinds of
families work in different situations. Some people criticize relativist
views, especially when it comes to families, as too tolerant. Opponents to relativism say that such thinking allows important standards
to be abandoned and leads people into undisciplined lifestyles. By
some accounts, the origination of relativism can be dated to Protagoras (481-420 BC), who took issue with popular beliefs of the time
that human beings should aspire to godlike ethical perfection. Arguing for a more flexible approach to morality, Protagoras wrote that
“man is the measure of all things.”9
Nearly eighty years ago, C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud famously
debated moral absolutism versus relativism. Much of the discussion
involved a disagreement over the existence of God and the importance of science. Lewis, born an Irish Christian and the author of the
seven-book Chronicles of Narnia (1949-1954) series, asserted that
science could not adequat<;:ly explain the mysteries of the creation
and workings of the universe. 10 Lewis wrote, “We want to know
whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or
whether there is a power behind what makes it what it is.” 11 To
Lewis, the only answer is that there must be a God who made the
world and gave people the principles of moral law. Lewis believed
that certain truths are hardwired into human consciousness, evidenced in the way codes of behavior-including abilities to discern
right from wrong-replicate themselves from culture to culture and
throughout human history. Freud, whose parents were Moravian
Jews, contended that God was a mental fabrication that obscured the
fact that moral conventions emerge from human experience. To
Freud, morality is made up by people for practical reasons. Humanity discovers moral laws the way it came upon mathematics, through
observation and reasoning. People are born as blank slates. Moral
precepts are passed from adults to children through educational
processes. Both Lewis and Freud argued about German Nazism.
Lewis argued that the Nazis had mistakenly adopted an alternate
reality in which they strayed from God, deceived into forgetting a
BELIEF 61
morality they had originally recognized. For Freud, the Nazis proved
that people could learn evil rather than goodness. Freud argued that
the solution to Nazism was not religious virtue, but a superior system
of reason.
Idealism, Realism, and Pluralism
Further insights into the debate over absolutism and relativism are
found in the philosophies of idealism and realism. Idealists resemble
absolutists in embracing tradition as a central value-a kind of
anchor. Idealism argues that we perceive the world from an enduring
perspective that transcends all other points of view. Idealism holds
that reality is mind-correlative or mind-coordinated. To idealists,
tangible objects are not independent of the conscious mind but exist
only through processes of intellectual operations. The everyday world
of things and people is not the “real” world but a representation as it
appears to be. Late eighteenth-century idealist Hegel argued that an
internal spirit guides all perceptions, including human reason. Hegel
described a “world-soul,” existing through all history, which emerges
from a process now known as the Hegelian dialectic. A contemporary of Hegel’s, Immanuel Kant, wrote that the mind shapes our perceptions of the world to take form in both time and space. Kant
believed that all we can know are mental impressions of an outside
world. Such mental impressions may or may not exist independently
from the “real” because we can never access that outside world
directly.
Idealists view people as governed by universal truths to which
they should always aspire but can never achieve. These transcendental values exist for all time and apply to all people, regardless of their
historical circumstance or cultural heritage. In social terms, idealists
tend to put their emphasis on behavior, attributing human success
or failure to attitudes people bring to their exercise of free will. Thus
values like paternal authority and marriage are held up as goals to
which everyone should subscribe. Idealists see a fundamental correctness in existing arrangements but fear its enabling values are
eroding. This is the logic that argues that job discrimination, sexual
harassment, and unfair housing practices really aren’t that much of a
problem, and the government programs to rectify them provide
62 A CULTURE DIVIDED
inegalitarian preferences upon which “minority” groups become
dependent. Great importance is afforded to cultural issues, as manifest in controversies over literary canons, artistic censorship, and the
labeling of records and video games. Culture is seen as the embodiment of these timeless values, not the reflection of everyday life or
work. Idealist culture manifests itself in chosen lists of” great books”
and masterpiece artworks housed in special preserves of aesthetic
contemplation. Separated from the exigencies of daily life, art is
seen as devoid of political content or implication. Ironically, rarely is
any consideration given to the corrupting influence of a market that
emphasizes competition, greed, and wealth as measures of human
worth.
Realism assumes that reality inheres in everyday experience and
that its functions can be accessed and known. Attending to immediate circumstances in this way, realists often embrace relativism.
Because what we know derives from the here and now, realism relies
on descriptions of objects and environments. Realism recognizes the
importance of ordinary observations and events. It tends to reject
idealistic views of the heroic and transcendental. In the early 1600s,
realist philosopher Descartes asserted that knowledge derives from
the senses, and that we understand abstractions by relating them to
our actual experiences of the world. Writing in the latter half of the
seventeenth century, John Locke likewise asserted that a perceivable
world exists “out there,” which has certain qualities that underlie our
broader understandings and knowledge.
Realists see truth emerging from the lived experiences of human
beings. As such, realists recognize that values develop differently
from culture to culture and from era to era. Rules about gender relationships or family structures are not permanently fixed but need to
be evaluated in the context of changing social needs. Realists are
often critical of a society they believe is emphasizing greed and competition rather than social justice. As a consequence, realists promote
government programs to correct the inequities produced by market
forces. Rather than attempting to manipulate people into adopting
social norms, realists seek ways of broadening society to be more
indusive–more tolerant of diversity and difference. Instead of blaming people in need for their circumstances, realists are more likely to
favor a fundamental redistribution of wealth through such measures
BELIEF 63
as assistance programs, government subsidies, and progressive tax
legislation. Arguments that some people might lack motivation or
require forms of moral education are rejected as biased. This fundamentally redistributive program has made realists (who generally
ascribe to liberal social politics) vulnerable to the charge that they
simply want to throw resources at problems. As realist Molly Ivins
jokingly stated, “This may sound simple, but the real problem with
poor people is that they don’t have enough money. ”
12 To realists, culture is found in many places from the gallery to the classroom to the
street. Because culture is found in the daily encounters people have
with one another, it can be used to educate citizens and improve
their living conditions. Because it is tied to daily life, culture always
bears political implications.
In their postures of mutual exclusion, both idealist and realist
camps hold part, but not all, of the means to understand social problems. The inadequacy of such polarized thinking became apparent in
the 1990s with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and
the evaporation of the Soviet threat. The George W. Bush years signaled a return to black-and-white reasoning. Yet as the 2008 elections demonstrated, Bush’s failure to acknowledge a more nuanced
vision didn’t dick with the voting public. Approaches to politics that
would separate issues into neat categories-like the separation of
economic structure from cultural behavior-no longer seemed
viable.
One way to reconcile idealism and realism is through the doctrine
of pluralism. William E. Connolly writes at length about this distinction, argµing that although realists reject the idea of a single doctrine
that applies to all people, they eventually must make dear choices in
specific situations. 13 Hence, a realist who opposes the general principle of capital punishment might accept the death penalty for an especially heinous crime such as terrorism. In contrast, pluralists always
keep multiple options in play and would not necessarily practice an
idealist “eye for an eye” approach to evil. Pluralism is difficult to
practice because it requires the energy and restraint to maintain multiple perspectives in one’s mind. Moreover, pluralism cannot eternally vacillate between options. To do so would render it unable to
take any action. Instead pluralism strives to maintain an awareness of
options before, during, and afi:er an action takes place. As Connolly
64 A CULTURE DIVIDED
writes, pluralism “encourages us to embrace certain things in this
particular place, to be indifferent to some, to be wary of others, and
to fight militantly against the continuation of yet others.”14
But not all versions of pluralism are created equal. The impetus
for pluralism has historical roots in the liberal discontent with large
government bureaucracies. Historically, this difficulty was exacerbated by the social diversification and class stratification brought
on by industrialization. In the post-World War II era, theorists in
Europe and the United States began to argue that forms of pluralism that pitted individuals against the state oversimplified the idea
of citizenship. Specifically, this thinking failed to consider differences among people based on issues of gender, race, national origin,
age, or sexual orientation. Perhaps more importantly, postwar pluralism failed to recognize the permeability of the categories public
and private.
Poststructuralist theorists of the 1990s saw this dumping of ideas
into either public or private domains as a return to one-dimensional
modernist thinking. Not only did postwar U.S. pluralists reinforce
conventional public/private categories, but they also were incapable
of recognizing the subjects of politics as anything besides members of
discrete groups; Postwar pluralism marked a significant advance over
unreconstructed liberalism in carving out a larger role and a more
complex arena for citizens to act politically, but it did so only within
existing understandings of civic roles. Ernesto Ladau and Chantal
Mouffe proposed what they termed a “radical democratic” reconceptualization of the citizen unencumbered by old categories of the
modernist self Rather than a unified and autonomous member of a
particular group, within this formulation each person belongs to
numerous overlapping groups and multiple intersecting identities. As
Mouffe explains, “It is not a matter of establishing a mere alliance
between given interests, but of actually modifying their identity to
bring about a new political identity.”15 In this “poststructuralist pluralism” individuality is maintained because of the relatively unique
mix of associations within each person.
Although it remains to be implemented in contemporary politics,
the poststructuralist approach to pluralism has become manifest in
the growing influence of advocacy groups in politics-enabled in the
2000s by decentralized technologies such as the Internet. By opening
BELIEF 65
new realms of public discourse, this networked pluralism gives fresh
vitality to the impetus for democratic principles. The politicization
of social spaces formerly considered neutral makes apparent the often
unacknowledged power relations in everyday activities. In this way,
such “off-limits” territories as popular culture, education, and the
family become sites of critical investigation and emancipatory contest. Rather than diminishing political involvement, radical democracy helps people see political opportunities everywhere.
Obviously the task ahead is far from easy. The polarizing effects of
conventional “liberal” versus “conservative” views of politics make
life difficult for alternative thinking. This dualistic view is encouraged by an electoral process that produces a rhetoric of mandates and
landslides from narrow margins of the vote similar to those put forth
in recent presidential elections. Our current winner-take-all process
yields little understanding of the important relationship between
minority and majority stockholders in participatory government.
This encourages a strange denial of oppositional possibility. Perhaps
the time has come to recognize that the majoritarian visions of both
major political parties ends up devaluing human diversity. In their
desperate efforts to claim majorities, differences with parties are
viewed as obstacles to be suppressed in favor of a broader consensus.
This is how vague appeals to populism can really represent an elitism of their own. To achieve their own visions of national identity,
both liberals and conservatives have assaulted in admittedly different ways-multiculturalism or identity politics as divisive. Ignoring
historically entrenched power asymmetries, the big political parties
have argued that “special interests” subvert the potential of a national
accord. Promoted instead is a monolithic definition of citizenship,
which dismisses the specificity of human variety as either irrelevant
or selfish.
The antidemocratic implications of this pseudo populism become
apparent in the way extreme political attitudes become naturalized in
partisan discourses. Take education, for example. Republicans and
Democrats seem incapable of reconciling their political appeal to a
mainstream identity and an educational appeal to uniform “standards” of achievement. Implicit in recent school reform plans from
both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush-with their programs of universal testing, their vague suggestions of a uniform curriculum, and
66 A CULTURE DIVIDED
their invitation to business interests to manage public educationis the belief that the nation has spent too much time pursuing educational equity and too little time in advancing rarefied standards
of excellence. These attitudes have made many young people feel
powerless, alienated, and even angry.
Enacted by the Bush administration in 2002, federal No Child
Left Behind (NCLB) legislation reauthorized several programs aiming to improve the performance of U.S. primary and secondary
schools by increasing standards of accountability and providing parents more flexibility in choosing schools. NCLB legislation promoted standards-based education reform, formerly known as
“outcome-based” education, predicated on the belief that measurable
goals improve student success in school. NCLB required new tests in
basic skills as a requirement for federal funding. NCLB was controversial for a number of reasons. As historically has been the case with
many national school reform efforts, NCLB was criticized because
the federal government provides such a small proportion of school
funding (which mostly comes from local property taxes). While in
some states more students appeared to pass standardized tests, this
was often proven to have resulted from lower testing standards. Also,
parents were angered by NCLB’s requirement that schools provide
student names and contact information to military recruiters. In
2009, President Barack Obama received criticism for his appointment of former Chicago Public School Director Arne Duncan as
Secretary of Education. Duncan built a reputation in Chicago for his
aggressive pursuit of standardized testing, surveillance, and police
presence in schools-manifest in the city’s “Renaissance 2010”
school reform plan. Although popular in Chicago business circles for
it’s accountability and businesslike approach to management, Renaissance 2010 was condemned by some educators as old-fashioned
and, ultimately, ineffective in improving student learning and success, especially in minority communities.16
All in the Family
Of course, controversies over schooling grow from the public concerns about children. Generally speaking, discussions about children
emerge from the broader discourse on families-a conversation
BELIEF 67
fraught with cultural baggage. Officials running for office recognize
that topics such as childhood, children’s welfare, and the death of
childhood work effectively in emotionalizing political arguments.
The meanings of such terms can be quite variable, ranging from references to innocent children that need adult protection, to menacing
children who take weapons to school, to the inner child, the childlike
adult, and the adultlike child. In other words, childhood is not a natural or fixed category. It is the screen upon which adults project their
social anxieties and desires. The figure of the child has been used historically to promote issues ranging from environmentalism (“children inherit the earth”) to tax reform (“mortgaging our children’s
future”). This is why the image of the child often comes attached to
idealized notions of the nuclear family, happy endings, and neatly
resolved stories where handsome princes always win and bad people
look like ugly monsters. At its core, the image of the child is an ideological construction that gets pitted symbolically against all that
white bourgeois society fears. David Buckingham writes about the
“politics of substitution” that childhood enables. In a climate of
social uncertainty, invoking fears about children provides a powerful
means of commanding public attention and support: campaigns
against homosexuality are redefined as campaigns against pedophiles;
campaigns against pornography become campaigns against child
predators; campaigns against atheism become campaigns against ritualistic child abuse. Those who dare to question the epidemic proportions of such phenomena are themselves labeled-via a politics of
substitution-as hostile to children. 17
When all else fails in many public policy debates, proponents of
just about anything haul out the image of the helpless and vulnerable
child. While it is true that children don’t have the same capabilities
as adults, it also can be said that these projections at times discredit
the intelligence of young people and contribute to a distorted infantilization. Close examination of children’s responses to violent cartoons, for example, reveals that they more often respond to the
excitement or excess of imagery than to the purposeful brutality of
“retaliatory violence.” When children write their own fairy tales, they
tend to avoid this latter type of violence and write happy endings for
all of the characters.18 Like adults, children do revel in the arousal
and excitement of aggressive representation in what Michael Zucker-
68 A CULTURE DIVIDED
man termed the “sensation seeking” motive. 19 Parents often worry
about children overidentifying with perpetuators of television or
movie violence. Surprisingly, there is very little data on this. What
the research has shown is that most children don’t imagine themselves committing violence, although roughly half empathize with
victims of violence.20 Even less plausible is the “forbidden fruit” theory that children’s desires are increased if attempts are made to
restrict access to a program. A variety of studies in the 1970s disproved this widely accepted belief.21
In many ways, the current discourse on children stands in for the
more politicized discussions of the family, gender roles, and adult
sexuality. The National Organization for Women (NOW) for a time
circulated a bumper sticker that read, “One Nuclear Family Can
Ruin Your Whole Life.” The slogan sums up the view that traditional
family structures so often equated with a healthy society-have
sometimes worked to limit women’s freedom. Throughout many
parts of the world, societies have or continue to be organized in
patriarchal structures in which men hold primary responsibility and
authority over family and community life. While such traditions
seem long forgotten in the contemporary Western world, it bears historical note that a privilege as fundamental as the right to vote wasn’t
afforded to women until 1920 in the United States, 1944 in France,
1949 in China, and 2006 in the United Arab Emirates.
One needs to examine only current women’s magazines to discover that entrenched stereotypes of women as the “weaker” or
“fairer” sex” perpetuate themselves in the pages of Cosmopolitan,
Glamour, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, and Wlgue-where
even more disturbingly women are frequently represented as childlike and girls are often made up to exude adult female sexuality.
Although women legally possess the same rights and theoretical
career options as men, roles of women as homemakers and caregivers
abound in the pages of such publications as Family Circle, Good
Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Martha Stewart Living, Redbook,
and \%mens Day. That these are the magazines most read by women
holds significance as a reminder of latent sexism in American culture.
One notable exception is 0, The Oprah Magazine, the single highcirculation women’s periodical with a pro feminist, diversity emphasis. Television has treated women in more progressive terms, led by
BELIEF 69
The \%mens Television Network, Lifetime, and popular programs like
Brothers and Sisters, Damages, Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, and
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles that feature women in
careers or other roles of autonomy. The one notable throwback is Desperate Housewives, representing what has been termed a “postfeminist”
sensibility in which purportedly liberated women voluntarily choose
subordinate and objectified roles.
Simple statistics reflect continuing inequities toward women. Fair
compensation for women in the workplace was written into law in
the 1963 Equal Pay Restoration Act. Yet today women are still paid
23 cents per dollar less than men with equal skills and education.
While women make up 51 percent of the population, only 13 percent of the U.S. Senate and 14 percent of the U.S. House of Representatives are women. Approximately 25 percent of doctors and
lawyers are women, although a much smaller percentage of corporate
executive positions are held by women. 22 In global terms, The
United Nations has stated that “progress in bringing women into
leadership and decision-making positions around the world remains
far too slow. “23 The Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Gender Issues, Rachel Mayanja, said, “The past ten years have seen the
fastest growth in the number of women in parliaments, yet even at ‘
this rate, parity between women and men in parliaments will not be
reached until 2040.”24 The term “glass ceiling” is used to describe
barriers based on discrimination. In the United States, the Glass
Ceiling Commission, a government-funded group, stated, “Over half
of all master’s degrees are now awarded to women, yet 95 percent of
senior-level managers of the top Fortune 1000 industrial and 500
service companies are men. Of them, 97 percent are white.”25
With such glaring evidence of a cultural divide along gender lines,
one might expect uniformity in public opinion about the need to
pursue equity. Yet opinion persists in some quarters that women have
strayed too far from their traditional roles. Conservatives argue that
America is threatened by a breakdown of the traditional tamily structure that, in their view, provides the only satisfactory way of raising
children. Conservatives assert that same-sex or single parent families
produce children more prone to failure. Then there is the Federal
“Defense of Marriage” Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton
in 1996. The act says that the federal government does not recognize
70 A CULTURE DIVIDED
same-sex marriages, but that states can do as they please. In recent
elections, measures to either legitimize or delegitimize same-sex marriage have been put on many state ballots.
Unfounded worries persist about single-parent families. Conservative commentator Ann Coulter writes, “The strongest predictor of
whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single parent.”26 Coulter is fond of quoting Charles Murray, who wrote
that “Illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our
time-more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare, or homelessness because it drives everything else.”27 These are
serious words, considering that today nearly one-third of children
are born to unmarried women. But is growing up in a nontraditional family really harmful? Most social scientists do indeed believe
that family environments strongly influence children’s subsequent
behavior in adult life. But what matters most in the family environment is the quality of attachment and care-giving. Children subject
to neglect or abuse may be more likely to find themselves in the
criminal justice system as young adults. 28 But even this is not to say
that a “cycle of violence” necessarily results from family life, as was
once theorized. Bad outcomes in adult behavior-including criminality-are a mix of upbringing, peer relationships, socioeconomic
conditions, education, and circumstance. Any effort to blame a single cause must always be examined with scrutiny. Most people
spend more time with their families than in work or school. Hence,
the family historically has remained one of the most potent objects
of political debate–and one of the central issues that can be used to
divide people–even though it is the most widely shared of human
experiences.
Fundamentalism and Secularism
Much had been made in during the past decade of the divide
between fundamentalism and secularism. Christian fundamentalist
camps largely avoided politics through the 1970s, believing that matters of the spirit were personal concerns. For the most part, fundamentalists also liked the separation of church and state that kept
government regulations out of church affairs. The fundamentalist
label is sometimes applied to Christian evangelical practices, which
BELIEF 71
are more accurately described as a branch of fundamentalism.
Fundamentalists-be they Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or any other
religion-try to adhere to the original tenants of a faith, generally
represented in classic texts such as the Bible, Torah, or Koran. Fundamentalists often interpret scriptural writings in a literal sense, rather
than viewing them in more modern interpretations as metaphors or
idealistic stories. For example, some Christian fundamentalists teach
that magical events, like instances of faith healing, really do take
place in the present day. In the United States the term “fundamentalist” came into use in the early twentieth century after publication of
pamphlets called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (1910-
1915). In part, the fundamentalist movement gained momentum in
response to the growing rise of science and societal changes brought
about through technology. Turn of the century fundamentalists were
especially troubled by the wide acceptance of Charles Darwin’s, Origin of the Species, which offered an evolutionary account of the development of human life.29 Christian fundamentalists still protest the
teaching of Darwin’s ideas in schools, often asserting that children
need exposure to creationist counterarguments.
Fundamentalists often use the term secularism to describe those
perceived as antireligious. The term “secular” originated in England
in the mid-1800s as a means of making a distinction between philosophical and religious ideas. Theorized by agnostic George Holyoake,
secularism promoted a social order separate from religion, without
actively dismissing or criticizing religious belie£ To Holyoake, “Secularism is not an argument against Christianity; it is one independent
of it. It does not question the pretensions of Christianity; it advances
others.”30 As this phrasing suggests, from its earliest appearance, secularism was seen by many as an assault on religion. More generally,
the term refers to the world of ideas outside religion. For this reason,
secularism often is used in political discussions that address the separation of church and state.
More than in most developed nations, religion figures prominently in American life. In the industrial world, the United States has
one of the lowest percentages of people who define themselves as
having no religion: 15 percent.31 More than 75 percent of American’s identify as Christian, two-thirds of whom are Protestants, with
the remaining group primarily identified as Catholic. 32
72 A CULTURE DIVIDED
Half of the Protestant population is known as Evangelical, which
well-known for the belief that people can be “born again.” Protestant
Evangelicals are somewhat more moderate in their beliefs than fundamentalists, who subscribe to literal interpretations of Biblical doctrine. Christian Fundamentalists appeared in the American political
realm following the 1976 presidencial election of Democrat Jimmy
Carter. Forming what they called a Moral Majority, Christian fundamentalists helped sweep Ronald Reagan into office a few years later.
Republicans held the White House for twelve years and perceived the
election of Bill Clinton in 1992 as a tragic loss to the forces of secularism. To regain influence over the nation’s politics, religious conservatives decided to focus on state and local politics, organizing a mass
movement known as the Christian Coalition. Conservatives took
control of both houses of Congress in the mid-1990s. Building on
the momentum of those efforts and the scandals of Clinton’s final
years in office, George W. Bush took the White House in 2000 and
held it for eight years, capitalizing in part on public fears that
resulted from the bombing of the World Trade Center and subsequent terrorist attacks around the world.
The 9/11 attacks were perpetuated by a small group of Arabic
criminals who espoused beliefs in Islamic fundamentalism. To many
in the United States, the actions of the al-Qaeda terrorists were seen
as emblems of a global Islamic assault on the United States rather
than the actions of an isolated group. But since no national government had supported the terrorists, it was difficult for the United
States to target a counterassault-or even a way to track down the
attackers. In an effort to give form to this enemy, George Bush formulated his Axis of Evil and began to search for a reason to attack
one of its member nations. This required a substantial public relations campaign, which the Bush administration mounted with the
advice of marketing consultants. On the grounds that a new attack
against the United States would soon be launched from Iraq, America invaded that country, to find only that Iraq didn’t have the
weapons of mass destruction it was thought to possess. The political
fullout from this mistake gave Democrats the arguments they needed
to retake Congress and later the presidency.
Regrettably, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and several other incidents have given rise to perceptions of a growing “war” between
BELIEF 73
Islam and the Western world. Though it is widely acknowledged that
9/ I 1 was executed by a very small minority oflslamic extremists, suspicions of wider Islamic aggression persist. In recent years, books
have been appearing that support such fears, including Steven Emerson’s American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us and Brigitte
Gabriel’s They Must Be Stopped: Why � Must Defeat Radical Mam. 33
Building on the emotionalism following 9/11, such works obscure
the reality that terrorist attacks in United States have been perpetuated by non-Islamics in places like Oklahoma City and Columbine
High School.
Many Americans don’t know that Islam is the second largest faith
in the world after Christianity. Now a religion of 1.8 billion people,
Islam is practiced by people known as Muslims, a word that means
“One who submits to God.” Muslims believe that God-also called
Allah-was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, the same God that
Christians and Jews believe spoke to Abraham. Most of the world’s
Muslims live in the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Southeast
Asia. There are several branches oflslam, the two largest of which are
Sun.ni and Shi’a, who differ in their interpretation of Muhammad’s
teachings. Contrary to some perceptions in the United States and
elsewhere, Islam does not promote aggression or intolerance. In fact,
the Muslim scripture known as the Koran (or Quran) states that
“Those who believe (in the Quran), and those who follow the Jewish
(scriptures), and the Christians … and (all) who believe in God and
the last day and work righteousness, shall have their reward with
their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.”34
The growing awareness of the Islamic world among people in the
United States also has brought attention to the American Jewish
population. At between 5 and 6 million people, America’s Jewish
population is roughly equivalent to that of Israel. Together the two
nations are home to 80 percent of world’s Jews. Sephardic Jews from
Spain and Portugal began immigrating to the United States in the
early 1800s, with a dramatic increase in the latter part of the century of Ashkenazi Jews from Germany and the Eastern European
nations of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania. Initially settling primarily
in the eastern United States, Jewish communities quickly developed
their own support networks, which were reinvigorated following the
Nazi Holocaust of World War II. The influence ofJews in American
74 A CULTURE DIVIDED
business and academia has far exceeded their 2.5 percent share of the
U.S. population, as has their influence on politics. Jewish Americans
account for 37 percent of U.S. recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, 8
percent of the board seats of U.S. corporations, and 13 percent of the
U.S. Senate. The role of Jews in U.S. leadership positions partially
explains America’s longstanding commitment to Israel, along with
Israel’s position as a bulwark of U.S. interests in the Middle East. As
the United States has improved its diplomatic relationships with the
region’s oil-producing nations, most notably Saudi Arabia, ArabIsraeli tensions within the U.S. population have become another
aspect of America’s divided culture.
Authoritarianism and Consumerism
As America grapples with its real and imagined enemies, the nation
also struggles with the erosion of the very principles it seeks to protect. Part of what is dividing U.S. culture is a weakening of democracy. As America strives to regain its role as an example for the world
to follow, its own people are succumbing to apathy and indifference even as they search for renewed purpose and “change.” The
most damaging impediments to American democracy can be summarized in two categories: authoritarianism and consumerism.
Authoritarianism is the process often associated with modernism,
structuralism, and functionalism, which imposes bureaucratic regulation, surveillance, and control upon human activity. In this scheme,
people submit to larger structures in the presumed interest of the
social good. During the Bush years, authoritarianism got an historic
boost with 9/11, which was used to spread fear and compliance
throughout the nation. Suppressed in the process was any sense of
autonomy or permission to challenge the prevailing order. Beyond
being told that they cannot question the interest of national security,
citizens are implicitly told that they should not rock the boat, cause
trouble, or upset the system. This thinking suggests that disagreement is a function of individual anomaly, maladjustment, inadequacy, or lack of will. Authoritarianism can be described as the
process through which people come to be seen as passive and easily
manipulated objects, rather than active and autonomous subjects.
Authoritarianism perpetuates a fatalism that tells people they can do
BELi EF 75
little to alter the course of history or their own lives. This passive ideology infuses mass media. Movies, television, magazines, and newspapers suggest that the production of ideas and images is something
that is always done by someone else. This message also is reinforced
in the socializing processes of education that teaches children-later
to become citizens-about hierarchies of knowledge, expertise, and
superv1s1on.
Consumerism tells people that acquisition and consumption are
the road to personal satisfaction, while it simultaneously promotes
hierarchies of wealth and power. Clearly, consumerism frustrates
community by encouraging competitive acquisition. Debilitating fictions of “making it” and “the good life” are defined in terms of solitary consumption rather than civic concern. In the late 1990s,
former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put it this way:
‘There is no such thing as society, only individual men and women
and their families.”35 The first strategy for getting out of the consumerist trap lies in pointing out the things that people actually
value most-friends, family, and home-cannot be bought with
money. Next, on a broader social level, one can raise the question of
how well off the average citizen is and examine the circumstances of
those who have suffered the consequences of economic failure. Given
the glaring lack of equality in the United States, one can’t help asking
why more people aren’t clamoring for radical change. Maybe it has
to do with the perception that the task is so overwhelming. Or perhaps it results from the lack of a meaningful program from either
political party. At the very least, critical intellectuals can encourage
the growing rage of all citizens silenced by the ideals of consumerist
paradise. With each passing year, the distance between the dream
and the reality widens. The reckoning that is coming holds both possibilities and potential difficulties for real social change.
Is any real progress on the horizon? The grip of authoritarianism
and consumerism on the American people seems to be weakening.
As the government in Washington has been handed back and forth
in recent decades between the Republicans and the Democrats,
there appears to be a growing desire for meaningful social transformation. For this reason, it is more important than ever for people
committed to change to seize the initiative rather than wait for others to act. This is the challenge of the Obama era. Well before the
76 A CULTURE DIVIDED
Obama administration, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe presciently argued, “If the demands of a subordinated group are presented purely as negative demands subversive of a certain order,
without being linked to any viable project for the reconstruction of
specific areas of society, their capacity to act hegemonically will be
excluded from the outset.”36 Framed in this manner, the solipsistic
nihilism that had so dominated progressive politics in the early
2000s was both defensive and counterproductive. We need a positive plan.
This new initiative must combine a politics and an ethics of a sort
not typically drawn upon by activists. These entail types of practice
that both eschew easy answers and ambivalent relativism. The seemingly paradoxical recipe needed will respect differences, oppose
oppressions, and permit the contingencies of provisional spaces of
experiment with new social forms. Given such a challenge, it is
incumbent upon future change agents to reassert their roles in civic
life. This calls for activists to assume new social roles and to pursue
new forums for civic dialogue. 37 As politics in the 2000s has shown,
new public spaces like the Internet have remarkable potential for
invigorating political life, especially among the young and previously
disenfranchised. This kind of change entails promoting notions of
shared responsibility for community life along with the belief that
change is indeed possible. This is a profoundly cultural endeavor in
that it is an act of political education. Such a cultural program convinces people that individual acts of citizenship (such as voting) can
make a difference-that people themselves can command the
authority to make community decisions.
At the heart of the struggle must stand a set of competencies
through which cultural activists can dismantle structures that exclude
people from political life and that tell people their voices are unimportant. At the same time, it is necessary to connect a pair of concepts that authoritarian consciousness always has found itself unable
to reconcile: difference and egalitarianism. In the bankrupt authoritarian view, differing needs or interests are to be overcome or suppressed in the interests of equality. Implicit in this view is a hierarchy
of opinion supporting an idealized “national” identity. While this
idealized appeal to the common good can encourage citizens to look
beyond their narrow self-interests, it also asks them to give up someBELIEF 77
thing of themselves. A genuine democracy does not make these kinds
of demands but strikes a balance between differing interests and egalitarian society
Consumerism and authoritarianism work against this delicate balancing. For this reason, critically minded citizens need to keep
democratic values at the forefront of American public debate-not
the authoritarian democracy of unproblematic civic verisimilitude
and flag-waving patriotism, not the consumerist democracy in which
people are free to spend themselves into a happy life-a democracy
defined by continual struggle, change, and critical revision. This is
not to suggest a return to nostalgic origins but to propose a democratic imaginary perhaps yet unachieved in American history. The
task has political and ethical dimensions. In political terms, the common shortcoming of all prevailing governments (including utopian
ones) is their applications of a single set of standards for everyone.
This problem becomes particularly evident within conventional liberalism. Although frequently presented as a pathway to emancipation, mainstream liberalism nevertheless perpetuates distinctions
between historical subjects and objects: those who act and those who
are acted upon. It seeks to make surface corrections to a structurally
flawed system without interrogating its underlying inequities.
Regrettably, this is the pitfull of much high-minded intellectualism
and academic theory, which commits the additional sin of claiming
vanguard wisdom only for its own members. Such condescending
logic has also been attributed to the prescriptive exhortations of
“empowerment” associated with social concern.
In contrast, a genuine democracy-what Laclau and Mouffe term
a “radical democracy”–defines itself on all levels in pluralistic terms.
There is no single set of attitudes or social group to which all others
must conform because an acknowledgment is made of the impossibility of any one perspective that satisfies diverse needs. Instead, the
unifying ethos is one of decentered authority. Owing to this latter
principle, such a political program resists the vacuous amoralities of
relativism and unexamined pluralism. For obvious reasons, such a
scheme seems dangerously unstable to many conservatives who warn
of the “threat” of uncontained difference. This is where the ethical
dimension of radical democracy comes in. What is necessary is a way
to integrate public and private realms without succumbing to a
156 NOTES
the Crossroads in the Information Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001); David Trend, Reading Digital Culture (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2001); David Trend, The Myth of Media Violence (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2007); David Trend, Everyday Culture: Finding and
Making Meaning in a Changing World (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2007).
19. Georg W ilhelm Frederich Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit,
trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).
Chapter 3
1. George W. Bush, “Victory Speech,” delivered at Yale Universiry,
December 20, 2000, http://everything2.com (accessed February 24,
2009).
2. Ronald Reagan, “Evil Empire Speech,” March 8, 1983, http://www
.teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=961 (accessed
May 15, 2008).
3. Holy Bible, King James Version, “Book of Genesis,” vol. 5, ch. 3
(Philadelphia, PA: National, 1978).
4. George Lakoff, Whose Freedom? The Battle over Americas Most
Important Idea (New York: Picador, 2006), 12.
5. Ibid.
6. Jack Zipes, Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children s
Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (New York: Routledge,
2001), 42.
7. Rene Descartes, as quoted in David E. Cooper, World Philosophies:
An Historicallntroduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 253.
8. Joshua Alston, “Too Much of a Bad Thing,” Newsweek (January
12, 2009), http://www.newsweek.com (accessed February 2, 2009).
9. Protagoras, “Moral Relativism,” http://www.wikipedia.org
(accessed May 10, 2008).
10. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles ofNarnia (New York: HarperCollins,
2006).
11. C. S. Lewis, quoted in Armond M. Nicholi and Theodore Dalrymple, “C. S. Lewis vs. Sigmund Freud on Good and Evil,” American
Enterprise, http://www.taemag.com (accessed May 11, 2008).
12. Molly Ivins, untitled address, National Public Radio, June 22,
1995.
13. William E. Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke Universiry
Press, 2005).
NOTES 157
14. Ibid., 42.
15. Chantal Mouffe, “Democratic Politics Today,” in Dimensions of
Radical Democracy, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1991).
16. Henry A. Giroux and Kenneth Saltzman, “Obama’s Betrayal of
Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of Schooling,” http://www.truthout.org (accessed January 30, 2009).
17. David Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in
the Age of Electronic Media (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 11.
18. Ibid., 72.
19. Michael Zuckerman, Sensation Seeking: Beyond the Optimal Level
of Arousal (New York: Wiley, 1979).
20. Ibid., 99.
21. “Women’s Gains in Politics Not Seen in Board Rooms, CEO
Offices,” November 17, 2008, http://www.news.ucdavis.edu (accessed
February 8, 2009).
22. UN Division for the Advancement of Women, “Women Still
Struggle to Break through Glass Ceiling in Government, Business, and
Academia,” March 8, 2006, http://.www.un.org (accessed February 2,
2009).
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ann Coulter, Guilty: Liberal Victims and Their Assault on America
(New York: Crown Forum, 2008), 37.
26. Charles Murray, cited in Coulter, Guilty, 37.
27. S. E. Holmes Jr. and J. Kashani Slaughter, “Risk Factors in Childhood That Lead to the Development of Conduct Disorder and Antisocial Personaliry Disorder,” Child Psychiatry and Human Development 31
(2001): 183-193.
28. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle far Life
(New York: BiblioBazaar, 2007 [1859]).
29. “Secularism,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularism (accessed
May 15, 2008).
30. “American Religious Identification Survey,” Ciry Universiry of
New York, 2001, http://www.gc.cuny.edu (accessed February 10, 2009).
31. Ibid. Other religious denominations in the United States are
Mormon (1.6 percent), Muslim (0.6 percent), Buddhist (0.5 percent),
and Hindu (0.4 percent).
158 NOTES
32. Steven Emerson, American jihad: The Terrorists Living among Us
(New York: Free Press, 2002); Brigitte Gabriel, They Must Be Stopped·
Why m Must Defeat Radical Islam (New York: St Martin’s, 2008).
33. “The Cow,” in Qur’an, 2:62.
34. Margaret Thatcher, “AIDS Education and the Year 2000,” speech
delivered October 31, 1987, http://www.margarettharcher.org (accessed
February 27, 2009).
35. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore
and Paul Cammack (London: Verso, 1985), 189.
36. See Jilrgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol.
1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy
(Boston: Beacon, 1984).
37. See John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 321-360.
Chapter4
1. U.S. Census Bureau, The American and Alaska Native Population:
2000 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2001).
2. Emme Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” http://www.libertystatepark.com/emma.htm (accessed February 24, 2009).
3. Roy Beck and Steven A. Camarots, “Elite vs. Public Opinion: An
Examination of Divergent Views on Immigration,” Center for Immigration Studies, 2002, http://www.cis.org/articles/2002/backl 402.html
(accessed June 19, 2008).
4. “Public Opinion Polls on Immigration,” Time (January 2006),
http://www.fairus.org (accessed June 19, 2008).
5. Deborah White, “Pros and Cons of the Immigration Reform Act
of 2007,” http:1/about.com (accessed June 18, 2008).
6. Sam Roberts, “Government Offers Look at Nation’s Immigrants,”
New York Times, February 21, 2009.
7. Congressional Budget Office, Immigration in the United States
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Offcie, 2006).
8. “Myths and Facts about Youth Crime,” Center on Juvenile Criminal Justice, 2000, http:l/www.cjcj.org/jjic/myths_facts.php (accessed
June 25, 2008).
9. Slavoj Zizek, mlcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso,
2002), 19.
NOTES 159
10. H. Aaron Cohl, Are™-Scaring Ourselves to Death? (New York: St
Martins, 1997), 9.
11. Claudine Chamberlain, “Fear of Fear Itself,” June 22, 2003,
http://abcnews.com (accessed January 3, 2009), 2.
12. Ibid., 1.
13. Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of
the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
14. Chamberlain, “Fear of Fear Itself,” 2.
15. Ibid.
16. Mike Males, Framing Youth: IO Myths about the Next Generation
(Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1998), 29.
17. David L. Altheide, Creating Fear: News and the Construction of
Crisis (New York: de Gruyter, 2002), 19.
18. Ibid.
19. Frederick John Desroches, Force and Fear: Robbery in Canada
(Toronto: Canadian Scholars, 2002).
20. Glassner, The Culture of Fear.
21. Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination
of Disaster (New York: Metropolis, 1998).
22. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (London: Wilder,
2008).
23. David Gardiner, The Science of Fear (New York: Dutton,
2008).
24. Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano, Stop Teaching Our Kids
to Kill: A Call to Action against Tv, Movie, and Video Game Violence
(New York: Crown, 1999), 1.
25. Glassner, The Culture of Fear, xxi.
26. Ibid.
27. Lewis Beale, “Picturing the Worst Happening,” New York Times,
July 7, 2002, sec. 2, 1, 9.
28. C. S. Green and D. Bavelier, “Action Video Game Modifies
Visual Selective Attention,” Nature 423 (2003): 534-537.
29. Eric Chudler, “Video Games May Improve Visual Skills,”
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/videog.html. (accessed June 19,
2003).
30. Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace; or How an Evil Clown, a
Haitian Trixter Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a
Database into a Society,” Village Voice (December 21, 1993): 36.