CONSERVATIVES DID NOT LOSE every battle in the contemporary culture wars. They defeated the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982. They slashed the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1994. They put an unprecedented number of drug offenders behind bars, turning the United States into an incarceration nation with the highest ratio of prisoners to citizens anywhere in the world. They expanded the role of religion in public life, turning explicit God talk into the new normal inside both major political parties. Finally, cultural conservatives turned “liberal” into a dirty word, “recast[ing] liberalism for large numbers of Americans as a moral threat rather than as a lift up.”1
Nonetheless, conservatives lost the contemporary culture wars and they lost them badly. As the counterculture mainstreamed, American society continued to drift left. Conservatives lost on tax exemptions for segregation academies. They lost Bob Jones University v. United States. They failed to pass constitutional amendments on either school prayer or abortion. They failed to eliminate the NEA. They lost on Clinton’s impeachment. Today the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which conservatives almost uniformly opposed as un-American, is among the most popular tourist destinations in the capital. And the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated are rising dramatically—from 16 percent in 2007 to 23 percent in 2015.2
Republicans did well at the ballot box in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and they trounced the Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections. Today, conservatives control many evangelical churches, think tanks, PACs, and talk radio stations. They have power in Washington, DC, and preach their gospel of loss and revival on their own culture wars television stations. But it is not the case, as sociologist Todd Gitlin once claimed, that liberals “have lost ground.”3 Nowadays it is Republicans, not Democrats, who are increasingly out of touch with ordinary voters on immigration, race, drugs, guns, women, homosexuality, and the environment. FOX News is rapidly being reduced to a rickety shrine to white male identity politics—a wooden bench in front of the town hall where crotchety white men gather to wax nostalgic about the good old days and complain about their increasing irrelevance at work, at home, and in church.
Polling data also shows strong leftward shifts on almost every “family values” issue: 62 percent of Americans now say the ideal marriage is one in which both spouses work and share housekeeping and child-rearing duties; only 30 percent favor a home with a male breadwinner and a female homemaker; and 63 percent of white Catholics say Roe v. Wade should not be overturned. These trends are particularly strong among millennials. In this cohort, which reached young adulthood in 2000, 68 percent favor same-sex marriage and 56 percent say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.4
Although pro-lifers have chipped away at Roe v. Wade, restricting the use of government funds for abortions and adding a series of hoops through which women must jump before ending a pregnancy, abortion remains legal in every state, and only one in five Americans believe it should be “always illegal.”5 Most Americans now favor marijuana legalization, and as of 2015, recreational marijuana use was legal in four states plus the District of Columbia, with medical use allowed in nineteen more. Four states now allow physician-assisted suicide. Women serve in the army and are training for combat roles. Day care centers are everywhere, and American families are evolving in precisely the direction the Moral Majority had feared, with women working more outside the home and men doing more housework and child care.6
The gay rights culture war is not quite over, but it is now plain how it is going to turn out. Those who oppose gay marriage used to be widely lauded as defenders of “traditional values.” Today they are widely criticized as bigots. In fact, in a 2015 poll, Americans said they would be more comfortable with a gay president than with an evangelical one.7
Thanks to Obergefell v. Hodges, gays and lesbians can now marry in all U.S. states. Whereas Pope Benedict denounced homosexuality as an “intrinsic moral evil,” his successor, Pope Francis, downplayed homosexuality, asking, “Who am I to judge?”8 The Southern Baptist Convention did a similar turnabout. During his years at the helm of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Richard Land was one of the nation’s most outspoken opponents of the “radical homosexual agenda”; in 2013, his successor, Russell Moore, urged Southern Baptists to “love your gay and lesbian neighbors.”9 The demise of Exodus International, an evangelical organization devoted to using “gay lifestyle” therapy to convert homosexuals to heterosexuality, provides a striking example of this cultural rout. As this group closed in August 2013, president Alan Chambers admitted the futility of its therapeutic approach. “I am sorry for the pain and hurt that many of you have experienced,” he said to clients and their families. “I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change.”10
In almost every arena where the contemporary culture wars have been fought—education, law, media, entertainment, family, and the arts—liberals now control the agenda. In secondary and higher education, the trends decried by 1980s conservatives remain firmly in place. Or, as sociologist Nathan Glazer put it, “We are all multiculturalists now.”11 Most high school students remain religiously and culturally illiterate, and today’s college students look very much like the young people Allan Bloom described roughly three decades ago in The Closing of the American Mind. Pop culture, especially, has gone over to the liberal side. Movies today make the sort of entertainment decried by the Moral Majority look like It’s a Wonderful Life. Modern Family, a sitcom featuring a gay couple and celebrating the diversity of American families, won five straight Emmy awards for best comedy series. The HBO hit Girls is clothing optional. And transgender stars now grace the cover of Entertainment Weekly. Reagan may have been a tax revolutionary, but when it comes to cultural politics the Reagan Revolution is a misnomer. “The Left . . . was never in danger of losing the so-called culture wars,” writes historian James Livingston. “At the end of the twentieth century . . . the United States was much less conservative than it had been in 1975.”12 And American culture is much less conservative now than it was in 1999.13
But liberals are not just defeating conservatives in the contemporary culture wars. All the culture wars explored in this book went the liberals’ way. From disputes over Jefferson’s heresies to gay marriage, liberals have triumphed. The Federalists lost. The anti-Catholics lost. The anti-Mormons lost. So did the prohibitionists.
With these liberal victories has come an increasingly expansive understanding of religious liberty. It is now difficult to imagine Americans killing one another over which Bible will be read in the public schools or refusing to allow Mormons to serve in the Senate. But we did that. Some of us even claimed that Catholicism and Mormonism were not really religions, so wed were most Americans to a Protestant worldview. Many citizens from the Jefferson wars forward saw religious liberty less as a right and more as a threat—not only to Protestant dominance but also to social order and familial harmony. This history only makes sense if we grant that neither “religion” nor “religious liberty” meant back then what these terms mean today.
In the midst of the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg observed that religious freedom has been “hard-won.” In the 1650s in New York City (then called New Amsterdam), Bloomberg said, Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant prohibited Quakers from meeting and denied a petition from Jews to build a synagogue. Not until the 1780s were Catholics able to establish their first parish in New York City. “This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions, or favor one over another,” Bloomberg said.14 But for much of American history, the government did just that. Protestantism served as an unofficial religious establishment. Catholics and Mormons were widely seen as deviations from that norm. Religious liberty was afforded infrequently and inconsistently to religious minorities.
This legacy is still with us. Many on the left now see religious liberty not as a protection for religious minorities but as a license for evangelicals and fundamentalists to discriminate against the LGBT community. On the far right, some claim that Islam is not a religion but a cult or a political ideology and is therefore not entitled to First Amendment protections. Still, it is undeniable that Americans’ understanding of religious liberty has evolved over time, largely as a result of the culture wars. That evolution has been toward more religious freedom and a more expansive understanding of religion itself. To be sure, Supreme Court justices still read “religion” largely through Christian lenses. And some Americans continue to ape nativists of the past by trying to banish Muslims from the American family. But if history is any guide, they are holding a losing hand.
The history of cultural warfare in the United States is not a pretty sight. In addition to hateful language and poisonous partisanship, it includes arson, calls for genocide, and the murder of abortion providers, Catholics, and the founder of America’s most successful new religious movement. But to look at the culture wars over the long term is to see that Americans, however haltingly, have agreed to define their nation in increasingly inclusive terms. It is no longer liberal to view Catholics and Mormons as fellow citizens. That sort of tolerance is now an American value. Soon it will be simply American to welcome gays and lesbians, too.
AS THESE EXAMPLES suggest, individual culture wars do end, for a variety of interconnected reasons. Sometimes the Right surrenders. Sometimes the combatants agree to a truce. Sometimes a new group to hate emerges and long-boiling antagonisms evaporate into the ether. Culture wars also end because the political parties that started and sustained them go out of power. The religious battles that swirled around the election of 1800 ended in part because the party that benefited from them—the Federalists—disappeared. Though Federalists controlled the federal government during the Washington and Adams administrations, they faded quickly after the election of 1800, and by the 1820s, they had largely vanished. The Know-Nothings met this same fate in the 1850s. The Republican Party could be next if it continues to ask “What Would Old White Men Do?”
Culture wars also end because “outsiders” accommodate themselves to the demands of “insiders.” Catholics gained acceptance by embracing church–state separation and by pledging, as Kennedy did during his 1960 presidential campaign, to keep their Catholic faith private. Mormons also made striking concessions. In order to win statehood for Utah, they gave up on both polygamy and theocracy, two practices that for decades had all but defined them as Saints.
Demographic shifts also help to explain this waning hostility toward “outsiders.” The explosive growth of the Catholic population, which made anti-Catholicism seem imperative to many Protestants as late as Al Smith’s 1928 defeat, made anti-Catholicism seem retrograde during the Kennedy–Nixon election. Yes, it was important to include Catholics under the Judeo-Christian sacred canopy as Americans fought the Cold War against “godless communism,” but it was also difficult to hate Catholics once “they” had become “us”—our neighbors, our bosses, our employees, our spouses, and our in-laws. A similar dynamic has been at play in recent years with gays and lesbians and the religiously unaffiliated, whose acceptance rose as more and more came out of the closet.
Shifts in public attitudes also helped to end the culture wars of the Roaring Twenties, but here the obvious failure of a particular public policy was key. Conservatives got their way with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment, but the unintended consequences that flowed from prohibition (bootlegging, organized crime, disrespect for the rule of law) led surprisingly quickly to its repeal.
In their efforts to purify their symbolic world of every jot of Old World popery and every tittle of New World sin, Puritans transformed America into a land of moralists ever on the lookout for demons in their ranks. By imagining their homeland as a New Zion, they established a precedent for morphing American political projects into religious crusades. So there is a long history here of using government power to impose Protestant values on non-Protestant citizens. But as any American history textbook will tell you, the United States is also the home of the Statue of Liberty, a country forever struggling to live up to its billing as a nation of immigrants (and religions) “yearning to breathe free.” In America’s many culture wars, this liberty proposition has had the upper hand. In the election of 1800, the Jeffersonians’ call for liberty drowned out the Federalists’ call for order. In the anti-Catholic and anti-Mormon wars, religious liberty defeated calls for a monoreligious America. The first effort to amend the Constitution in order to restrict liberty—the Eighteenth Amendment—was quickly repealed. And in recent years the freedom of women to have abortions and of gays and lesbians to choose their marriage partners has been vindicated.
IN TELLING THIS story of the lost causes of conservatism, it is important to explain not only why a particular culture war ends but also why culture wars in the plural persist.
Since the 1990s, the culture wars have repeatedly been left for dead. Just months after Pat Buchanan declared a “cultural war” at the 1992 Republican National Convention, neoconservative Irving Kristol remarked, “I regret to inform Pat Buchanan that those wars are over and the left has won.”15 In 1997, reporter Janny Scott observed that the term “culture wars” had become as anachronistic as a “leisure suit.” “Not long ago, one could hardly get through a week without stumbling across somebody or other’s culture war—outraged fundamentalists or neoconservatives or righteous multiculturalists raving about Hollywood or political correctness or Robert Mapplethorpe or Allan Bloom,” she wrote. But now the culture warriors had arrived “at Appomattox.”16 In 2001, in an essay called “Life After Wartime,” Andrew Sullivan also smelled surrender:
It wasn’t that long ago that we were all being rushed to the barricades to defend or attack any number of . . . hot-button social topics—abortion rights, gay visibility, pop-culture trash, affirmative action, the war on drugs—and not only as separate political issues but as a contest for the very soul of the country. Almost overnight, though, the energy seems to have seeped out of these conflicts. . . . [T]he crackle of cultural gunfire is now increasingly distant.17
More recently, intellectual historian Andrew Hartman argued in 2015 that the culture wars “are history. The logic of the culture wars has been exhausted. The metaphor has run its course.”18
Some evangelicals, angry over how little the Republicans they helped to elect have been able (or willing) to deliver, have retreated from cultural politics. Others, convinced that the fusion of evangelical piety and conservative politics is hurting the cause of Christ, have done the same. But evangelicals who have promised to do cultural war no more remain a minority. Every day new conservative Christians take to the Capitol or to the web to fight the good fight for God and the Good. There they meet up with Tea Party members whose cultural concerns run deep and whose zeal matches that of the most ardent fundamentalists. As a result, there has been no truce in the contemporary culture wars, and no surrender.
In fact, recent years have witnessed an expansion of the culture wars, beyond moral and religious questions into bread-and-butter political matters, such as taxing and spending. The modus operandi of the culture wars—the accusations of treason, the rhetoric of good and evil, the character assassinations, and the equation of compromise with surrender—have bled over into politics writ large, infusing government shutdowns and debt-ceiling battles not only with poisonous partisanship but also with the metaphors and mind-set of war. The result is a Culture War of Everything that is rapidly transforming previously bipartisan matters (foreign policy toward Israel, for example) into life-or-death struggles between Democrats and the GOP. Increasingly, we do politics like we have done cultural warfare. We are all culture warriors now.
This persistence and expansion of the culture wars is in some respects evidence of a thriving democracy and a vibrant public square. In a diverse country that welcomes debate, disagreements are inevitable. And in a place where so many different gods mean so much to so many, those differences are going to heat up.
But culture wars are also perennial because of compromises made at the outset of the American experiment, not least the founders’ decision to bequeath to their descendants a republic that was “half slave and half free.” Say what you want about the Obama presidency and the pitched battles it saw over such matters as whether the highest marginal tax rate should be 35 or 39.6 percent (or whether the debt ceiling should be raised by 2 percent), it simply isn’t credible to claim that the polarization that gripped the country in the Obama years had nothing to do with race. Tea Party events are whiter than Utah in winter, and Obama won 95 percent of the African American vote in 2008 and 93 percent in 2012.19 Despite the pivots of the Moral Majority from race to family and religion, culture wars rhetoric continues to be racially coded and the borders of our culture zones still roughly follow those of the Union and the Confederacy. “Make no mistake,” The Atlantic columnist Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his widely read essay “Fear of a Black President,” “today’s Republican radicalism, with all of its attendant terrifying brinksmanship, is the grandchild of the white South’s devastating defeats in the struggle over racial exclusion.”20
Regarding the vexed relationship between church and state, the founders rejected the European model of church–state marriage but never finalized a divorce, so this separation remains ambiguous. Is the United States a Christian country? A secular one? It has always been both. The founders signed on to a godless Constitution and did not require presidents to pass any religious test. But the country has never warmed to the French model of a naked public square stripped of religious influence. In fact, whatever wall of separation Americans built in the early republic was short and weak. Many presidents declared national days of fasting and prayer. Congress funded military chaplains and opened its sessions with supplications to the Almighty. This awkward compromise made the culture wars all but inevitable. It also gave Supreme Court justices a lot to try to sort out. Nowadays the nation’s highest court seems to be called upon every year to alchemize the murky into the clear—to determine just how many reindeers are required in a municipal Nativity display or what sorts of town-meeting prayers are sufficiently generic to pass constitutional muster.
Culture wars also persist because of the long-standing affinity between white evangelicalism and free-market capitalism. The Election Day victories that culture wars help to produce for Republicans lead to laws that benefit businesses by cutting regulations and securing corporate subsidies. But free-market capitalism does nothing to conserve traditional culture. In fact, it disrupts it. Capitalism’s bottom line is the bottom line, so retailers feel no compunction about competing with churches for customers on Sunday mornings or about opening big-box stores that will turn beloved Main Streets into ghost towns. As the economy grows, these losses build, and with them come new anxieties and new culture clashes.21
Finally and most basically, culture wars persist because conservatism persists, and because American conservatives from the French Revolution forward have seen cultural warfare as a way to win political power by promising to restore forms of life threatened with extinction. Political scientist Corey Robin is right to see modern conservatism as an effort to maintain hierarchies. Conservatives fight to protect the privileges of superiors—what Edmund Burke called the “chain of subordination” of soldiers to their officers, workers to their employers, tenants to their landlords, and children to their parents.22 But these political hierarchies are not the only concerns of conservatives, who will also go to the mat to defend cultural, moral, and theological hierarchies. And conservatives fight most fiercely to defend hierarchies that are falling away.
IN AMERICA’S MANY culture wars, traditionalists have protested the loss of Protestant consensus, the loss of an agricultural economy, the loss of American power overseas, the loss of theological and moral certainty, the loss of a unified nation, the loss of the hometown, the loss of the traditional family, the loss of a homogeneous society, and the loss of a simpler way of life threatened by the complexities of immigration, urbanization, and globalization. So cultural politics are always a politics of nostalgia, driven by those who are determined to return to what they remember (rightly or wrongly) as a better place, where straight, white, Protestant men ruled the roost and no one dared cluck at their authority.
This is why culture wars are often over before they have begun—because the fights culture warriors pick are almost always “lost causes” that are already moving into the liberal column. In fact, to borrow a term from the financial markets, you can use the culture wars as “leading indicators.” Just as the Dow Jones Transportation Average is said to forecast the upcoming state of the broader economy, increasing anger and anxiety about a cultural issue almost always foretell an impending liberal victory. In this respect, culture wars are, to borrow a term now from George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, a “revolt from reality”—a cry against what is coming around the next corner. And reality rarely bends to accommodate. This fact more than anything explains why any particular cultural clash comes to an end.
Today, the fact that the Left is winning the contemporary culture wars is widely acknowledged by the Right, whose conservative laments over losing the culture wars are commonplace. In an era when even the pope is saying that too much has been made in recent years of abortion, contraception, and homosexuality, much of the current conversation seems to turn on what conservative columnist Ross Douthat called “the terms of our surrender.” “We are not really having an argument about same-sex marriage anymore,” he wrote in 2014. “Instead, all that’s left is the timing of the final victory—and for the defeated to find out what settlement the victors will impose.”23
Such concessions do nothing to extinguish the culture wars, however. In fact, they rekindle them, since conjuring up losses in cultural politics is a time-honored strategy for securing Election Day victories. The strategy is to speak of losing just enough to keep the base perpetually girded for battle, but not so much to demoralize them. In this way, the culture wars are perpetually rising from the dead. Rather than being killed by any given defeat, conservative culture warriors seem to be revitalized by it. A loss on “man-man marriage,” as comedian Stephen Colbert calls it, only underscores the conviction that the nation is going to hell, and stiffens the resolve to fight a new enemy in the name of a new cause.24 The “religion of the lost cause” is the faith of Southerners who lost the War of Northern Aggression, but Federalists who lost the election of 1800 waxed nostalgic about their own “lost causes.” So did anti-Catholics, anti-Mormons, and drys, who lost their crusades for a more homogeneous nation, and members of the Moral Majority who are a majority no more (and, in fact, never were).
IN “THE PARANOID Style in American Politics,” published in Harper’s in 1964 as the Cold War was crackling hot and Barry Goldwater was realigning the spine of modern conservatism, historian Richard Hofstadter detected in U.S. history a recurring “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Those who are caught up in this “paranoid style,” as he put it, see conspiracies at every turn and the apocalypse at the end of every road:
[The paranoid] does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.25
Hofstadter, “the iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension” according to conservative columnist George Will,26 has been criticized for finding this irrationality largely on the right—in groups such as the McCarthyites and the John Birch Society—and for reducing American cultural politics to a psychological disorder. (As church historian Philip Jenkins drolly put it: “we are liberal; you are mentally ill.”27) But Hofstadter was right to home in on psychology as a culture wars catalyst and on the conservative propensity for setting unattainable goals. The psychological style of culture warriors is not paranoia, however. It is anxiety—anxiety about loss, about the passing away of a beloved “way of life.” But it is also anxiety about things out of place: Catholics in public schools, women in the workplace, foreigners in communities, gays and lesbians on the street, and a black man in the White House.
In her anthropological classic Purity and Danger (1966), Mary Douglas presented an intriguing reading of kosher food prohibitions in the biblical book of Leviticus. Rejecting the popular view that kosher eating began as a form of primitive hygiene—no pork, no trichinosis—Douglas offered a symbolic interpretation. What drove these food restrictions were notions of purity and pollution, and what made things impure and polluted in the symbolic world of the ancient Israelites was their ambiguity—their stubborn refusal to fit existing systems of classification. Animals of the sea are supposed to have fins and scales and swim from place to place. But what about a lobster? What sort of thing is that? It doesn’t really swim. It walks on the ocean floor as if it were on land. Obviously, it is confused. Or we are confused about what it is. Either way, it is a disconcerting mongrel, so if we want to stay pure we must avoid it.
This anxiety over ambiguous things—with things out of place—is hyperabundant in American society, which has always been informed by Hebraic as well as Christian values and continues to produce communities eager to return to the purity of original things—to the arrival of the pilgrims or to the spilling of tea in Boston Harbor or to the writing of the Constitution or even to Eden itself, when things were (supposedly) cleaner and less complex, to a time before The Fall.
It makes some sense to classify Senator Helms as a denizen of Hofstadter’s “paranoid style.” It makes more sense to understand Helms’s denunciation of Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs in moral and theological terms: Helms is outraged because male homosexuality is condemned in the Bible as an abomination against God and nature. But it is also possible to understand Helms as a man anxious about ambiguity. From this perspective, a man who has sex with another man is akin to a lobster, a disconcerting hybrid at odds with a classificatory scheme in which real men sleep only with their wives and no one even ponders the possibility (until rudely confronted by a disturbing Mapplethorpe photograph) of gay sex.
To attend to Falwell’s pro-life rhetoric is to tune in to the thinking of a man deeply troubled by abortion, yes, but also by the ambiguities the 1960s hath wrought. How else to explain his repeated denunciations of long hair on men (banned at Liberty University)? Didn’t Jesus have long hair? And Samson? By what logic, then, is long hair to be construed as an offense against holiness? Yet it is clearly an offense against clarity, at least in a system of classification in which short hair is for men and long hair is for women. In such a system, a man with long hair is also a lobster (or, in Falwell’s terms, a disturbing portent of a “unisexual society”28).
This symbolic perspective highlights the ways in which America’s culture wars are truly cultural wars—struggles over systems of classification that pit people who value purity against those who glory in impurity; struggles between people who revel in ambiguity, hybridity, and subjectivity (deconstructionists, for example) and those who insist (like Helms) that any book and any photograph must have one plain and simple meaning. It is possible to read the story of prohibition and repeal through moral lenses—as a struggle between the virtue of sobriety and the vice of drunkenness. But the culture wars of the 1920s and 1930s were not just about beer and cocktails, or even temperance and prohibition. They were about speakeasies, where blacks and whites drank, danced, and sweated together and activated, in the process, anxieties about impurity. They were about the “new woman” who cut her hair, smoked cigarettes, and otherwise confused the prevailing category of “woman,” much as males who grew their hair long confused for Falwell the category of “man.” By practicing polygamy, Mormons confused the categories of “family” just as surely as Catholics confused the category of “Christian.” What sort of odd believer was a Catholic or a Mormon anyway? What to make of a “Christian” who reads the wrong Bible (or “another testament” altogether)? Or of an American who pledges her allegiance to a monarch in Utah or Vatican City? Or, for that matter, of a presidential candidate whose religion cannot be clearly understood? What manner of man was Jefferson anyway? A Deist? An infidel? A Muslim?
Interpreters of Serrano’s Piss Christ clashed over what this photograph meant and whether Serrano designed it to offend Christians. But consider the photograph itself. It literally mixes two categories—the profane (“Piss”) and the sacred (“Christ”)—which are supposed to remain separate. The conservative response is to see this mixing, like the unkosher comingling of meat and milk at a meal, as “unclean.” But a pluralistic response glories in mixing these categories. It loves the lobster for its transgressions, for defying what a fish should do, for reminding us that there are always things out of place and that sometimes those things are ourselves.
This angle of approach illustrates how culture wars do cultural work—by surfacing cultural disagreements. But culture wars do more than that. Oddly, ironically, our cultural disagreements typically produce cultural agreements. Even as the culture wars cycle continues, particular conflicts produce consensus. Yes, these conflicts polarize us. But they eventually lead us, kicking and screaming in many cases, to welcome Catholics and Mormons into the American family, and to see families with gays and lesbians as American, too. In other words, culture wars do typically end with victories for liberals, but over time conservatives also accept the more inclusive vision of America those victories have secured. In this way, liberal convictions become national norms.
Consider the ongoing battle over immigration. Throughout U.S. history, the federal government has included some newcomers and excluded others. Criminals, stowaways, prostitutes, polygamists, and alcoholics have all been prohibited entry at one time or another. Asian immigration was curbed in the nineteenth century and opened wide in 1965. Today’s immigration debate focuses on Hispanics. Obviously, it is in the long-term interests of the Republican Party to welcome this cohort. With a minority-majority nation looming, the GOP needs to broaden its base beyond aging white people. Hispanics, who typically affirm both “family values” and conservative Christianity, are their natural allies. But almost all Republican politicians continue to oppose as “amnesty” any path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. GOP leaders were embarrassed by businessman Donald Trump, who during his run for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination said of Mexican immigrants, “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.”29 But part of that embarrassment sprang from the fact that his policies did not differ much from those of other Republican candidates (or, for that matter, from Republican Mitt Romney, who earned only 27 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012 after suggesting that illegal immigrants should follow a policy of “self-deportation”30).
Here we see yet another lost cause, which is being fought even as Hispanic clout is growing. If past is prologue, the United States is likely to open up to Hispanics just as it opened up to Chinese and Japanese immigrants. Americans overwhelmingly favor a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and business leaders nationwide rely on inexpensive labor from south of the border. So bashing Hispanics is a losing battle. Once undocumented immigrants are mainstreamed and this culture war fades away, pundits will record yet another victory for liberal inclusion. But soon enough this inclusivism, too, will come to be seen as simply American, freeing up culturally conservative Hispanics to enlist on the “right” side of culture wars to come.
SO, WHAT IS next? Where might the culture wars go from here? It is of course possible that the culture wars might fade away. But they have not faded away yet. The United States remains a deeply religious country with a public square still obsessed with sin and righteousness. As long as that remains the case, it is likely that the culture wars cycle will continue to spin out both lost causes and cultural conservatives determined to defend them.
The post-9/11 Islam wars are not over yet. Americans have often fixed their gaze on a religious enemy in their midst, and at least for now that enemy is Islam. Immediately after 9/11, President Bush used his bully pulpit to love-bomb Islam, and for a time it seemed as if the nation’s informal religious establishment, which had previously morphed from Protestant to Christian to Judeo-Christian, was about to become Judeo-Christian-Islamic, embracing the “Abrahamic” religions as three branches of a common faith. That did not happen, and every day the Islamic State beheads or burns alive another victim, it seems even less likely to happen.
The rhetoric of the contemporary culture wars could be ratcheted down. One cause of the rise of the “nones” (the religiously unaffiliated) in recent years has been the widespread linkage of Christianity with political conservatism. There is now good evidence that young people, especially, are leaving Christian churches because they associate Christianity with bigotry. In a 2014 survey, nearly one-third of millennials who left their families’ religious communities said they did so because of “negative teachings” about or “negative treatment” of gays and lesbians, and 70 percent of millennials said they believe religious organizations are “alienating young adults by being too judgmental on gay and lesbian issues.”31
Another demographic factor at play is the declining power and authority of the old white male demographic. Old white men are the bread and butter of FOX News today, but that cohort is literally dying off. As the country lurches toward a minority-majority population in the 2040s, the population is getting browner by the minute. Meanwhile, women are enjoying a more prominent role in politics. The Republican Party is trying to address this looming fact by cultivating Hispanic and nonwhite leaders, but almost all of these men—from Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida to Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal—are fire-and-brimstone culture warriors.
If part of the furor of today’s culture wars has to do with Obama’s mixed race, then some of it could subside under future presidents (assuming they are unambiguously white). Structural changes could also dial back the volume on the culture wars. The Tea Party could split off from the Republican Party and lose some of its force. If it does not moderate on issues such as homosexuality and immigration, the GOP itself could be weakened. The rapid rise of the religiously unaffiliated could also eliminate for decades any pretense of Christian politicians or ministers to speak for “the American people” as a whole.32
Another possibility is that a critical mass of white evangelicals really will take their marbles and go home. Meanwhile, a critical mass of Republicans could grow tired of the culture wars for the practical reason that they are hurting their brand among key constituents—blacks, Latinos, young people, women—they desperately need to court.
After all, lost causes only work until they don’t. Once they are truly and irrevocably lost, culture warriors will abandon them. That happened in the past with anti-Catholicism and anti-Mormonism, and it is starting to happen with opposition to gay rights. In 2004, ads attacking gay marriage helped to send George W. Bush to the White House; in the 2014 elections, some GOP candidates ran ads in favor of same-sex marriage. The LDS Church, which actively fought gay marriage in 2008 by supporting California’s Proposition 8, supported an LGBT antidiscrimination law that passed in 2015. Culture wars are about principles more than pragmatic politics, of course. And there will always be true believers who would rather lose an election than compromise on core principles. (In the battle for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, every candidate expressed his opposition to same-sex marriage, and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee called on all Americans to “resist and reject judicial tyranny.”33) But after the worm turns on any particular issue, these numbers diminish.
SOME OF MY liberal friends may be tempted to read this book as an argument for pressing for total victory in our culture wars. If liberals typically win these contests, why not demand abject surrender? Why shouldn’t gay rights advocates press for the government to force Catholic adoption agencies to place children with LGBT couples? Why shouldn’t women’s health advocates insist that the government force Catholic colleges to dispense contraception to their students? Why shouldn’t nondiscrimination policies at secular universities force evangelical student groups to allow non-Christian officers? To answer these questions you need to decide what sort of country you want to live in—what sort of public space you want to inhabit.
In an extended study of religious liberty and the culture wars, legal scholar Douglas Laycock lays bare the dangers cultural partisanship today poses to both freedom of religion and the American public square. Laycock is worried that America’s sexual revolution is going the way of the French Revolution, in which religion and liberty came to be seen as mortal enemies. Today in the United States, pro-choice, gay rights, and women’s health care groups increasingly see religious conservatives as bigots who want to impose their beliefs on others, and many on the left are starting to see arguments for religious liberty itself as thin cover for discrimination. Rather than viewing today’s culture wars over sex and religion as battles between light and darkness, Laycock sees them as principled disagreements. What one side views as “grave evils,” he observes, the other side views as “fundamental human rights.” What is needed, if we are to preserve liberty in both religion and sexuality, is a grand bargain of sorts in which the Left would agree not to impose secular morality on religious institutions while the Right would agree not to impose its religious rules on society at large. Unfortunately, this grand bargain seems out of reach because “each side is intolerant of the other; each side wants a total win.”34
Laycock’s work challenges combatants on both sides of the sexual revolution to consider what sort of country they want to inhabit. Do we want to live in an increasingly polarized country in which each side hates the other half? Or might we all learn to be satisfied with preserving liberty for ourselves without imposing our ideals on those whose consciences revolt against them?
In a 2013 essay announcing his support for gay marriage, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum said that the gay and lesbian couples he knows had prompted his turnabout on this issue. But he had also been “swayed by an intensifying awareness of the harm culture-war politics has done to my party.” These politics “have isolated the GOP from the America of the present and future, fastening it to politics of nostalgia for a (mis)remembered past,” he wrote. “Worst of all, culture-war politics has taught the GOP to talk to America as if the nation were split into hostile halves, as if more separates Americans than unites them.”35
Andrew Sullivan has been one of the most outspoken voices for gay rights since the New Republic ran his gay marriage cover story in 1989. In 2014, as Americans debated various state bills that would permit discrimination against gays and lesbians on religious liberty grounds, he called on the LGBT community not “to coerce people into tolerance”:
As a gay Christian, I’m particularly horrified by the attempt to force anyone to do anything they really feel violates their conscience, sense of self, or even just comfort. . . . We’re living in a time of drastic change with respect to homosexuality. It is perfectly understandable that many traditional-minded people, especially in the older age brackets, are disconcerted, upset and confused. So give them some space; instead of suing them, talk to them. Try seeing things from their point of view.36
Frum is Canadian and Sullivan is British, but both speak out of a great tradition of conciliation that since the time of Jefferson’s first inaugural has attempted to pull Americans out of the partisan muck. There is Patrick Henry affirming, “I am not a Virginian, but an American.”37 There is Lincoln insisting, in the midst of the Civil War, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.”38 And there is John F. Kennedy observing that “civility is not a sign of weakness.”39
AMERICANS TODAY HAVE a choice. We cannot choose to bring our political disagreements to an end. In a country where some eat lobster and some do not, where some cling to the pure and others revel in the mixed, where Christians of all stripes live and work alongside Jews, Buddhists, and the unaffiliated, there are always going to be deep-seated differences about moral, religious, and cultural questions. As Sullivan puts it, there are always going to be gays and bigots. Or, as conservative evangelicals might put it, there are always going to be sodomites and Bible believers. So Americans are not likely to stand united any time soon. Our arguments will continue. They should continue. But we do have a choice about how those arguments will proceed.
The Jewish tradition has long distinguished between two types of arguing: arguing for the sake of ego and arguing for the sake of heaven. On the one hand, there is arguing to win, to prove yourself superior to your opponent, to satisfy vanity and ambition. On the other hand, there is arguing to get closer to the truth. This second approach starts with humility—an awareness that neither side possesses the whole truth (only God has that), so each side stands to learn something by listening to the other. There is an American tradition of turning down the volume and tamping down the anger, of arguing on behalf of the nation, especially in wartime. But as this story of America’s culture wars demonstrates, much of American public life has been dominated by arguing on behalf of smaller things—the interests of self or social class or political party—with little or no regard for the common good.
Americans are not happy with this state of disunion. Thanks to what George Washington decried as the “mischiefs of the spirit of party,”40 Congress is now one of the most hated institutions in American life. But “we the people” did this. The DC Republicans who attack liberals as “socialists” and the DC Democrats who call conservatives “terrorists” did not get to the Capitol on their own. We elected them. And if there is no shortage on cable news channels of conservative culture warriors and liberals eager to take them down, we did that too. The question is whether we are going to continue to do more of the same.
As they look back on the story this book has told, liberals can take comfort in the fact that they almost always win our cultural battles—that the arc of American cultural politics bends toward more liberty, not less. Conservatives can take comfort in the fact that they win (politically) by losing (culturally)—that part of the appeal of Republicans who swept to victory in the midterm routs of 1994 and 2014 was the fact that they were willing to stand up and defend “lost causes.” But what can Americans take away from this story of our many culture wars?
One lesson might be that cultural warfare in the United States is unavoidable. At least from the time of the French Revolution, American politics has been a contest between right and left, with conservatives and liberals fighting fiercely over both economic and moral questions, both politics and religion. So perhaps there is no escaping yet another round of the culture wars cycle. As long as there are people in the United States anxious about the declining power and authority of whites, of men, of Christians, of the patriarchal family, and of America as a world power, there will be people eager to get up a revival dedicated to restoring the old order. As they peruse their towns, states, and country and see the things they hold dear slipping away, they will protest America’s moral and spiritual decay and they will blame “liberals” and “radicals” and “socialists” for victimizing them. Then liberals will respond with attacks of their own.
But there is an alternative lesson to be drawn from this story: The culture wars cycle only continues if it is fueled, and the fuel is a populace willing to go along for the ride—to cheer for its heroes and to jeer its political opponents as enemies of God and nation alike. Take away that fuel and the culture wars sputter. From this perspective, cultural warfare, while persistent throughout U.S. history, is not inevitable. It depends on conservatives and liberals playing the roles assigned to them. What if a significant cohort of the Right and the Left stopped playing these roles, stopped enabling politicians and pundits who don’t know the difference between a political antagonist and an enemy of the state? What if we refused to vote for them? What if we boycotted the corporations that fund them? What if, to paraphrase Jefferson in his first inaugural, we said, “We are all Republicans. We are all Democrats”?
Americans can look back on the culture wars from Jefferson to Obama and sign up for more of the same. Like fundamentalist pastors eager for another holy war against the Islamic world, or Muslim extremists thirsty for holy war against “Zionists” and their American enablers, we can look to the past to justify our belligerence. We can revisit the ugly rhetoric of the election of 1800 and see if we can make it uglier. We can employ the logic we used to justify attacking American Catholics and American Mormons in order to justify attacks on American Muslims. But we can also choose another course. We can refuse to excommunicate our antagonists from the American family. We can turn our culture wars into cultural debates.
A huge first step toward that choice would be to listen a little less to Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher and a little more to Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy, to realize that our cultural contests need not be life-or-death battles between patriots and traitors. Our culture wars would not be so enduring or run so deep if each side did not have a legitimate claim on American values. We possess no common creed, and the core texts in our “American Bible” argue against themselves.41 So when we debate what America means or what it means to be an American, each side typically has some founders on its side, some plausible interpretation of the American story. However hard culture warriors may strain to turn the United States into an either-or nation, Americans have traditionally affirmed both the Federalists’ beloved order and the Jeffersonians’ beloved liberty. Their values have included both life and choice. They have respected both the Christianity of the majority and the religious liberty of the minority. Like Jefferson himself, they have waxed poetic about liberty as an “inalienable right” yet been unable to put the sordid legacy of slavery and segregation behind them.
Yes, many of our culture wars are prosecuted on behalf of ego and party. They serve to puff up Bill O’Reilly or Donald Trump or to raise money for this PAC or that. But we have in our usable past voices arguing for the sake of heaven as well—voices of Americans struggling against their political opponents not for vainglory or even for an election victory but to make an imperfect nation a little less imperfect. Heed these voices and we all win.