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SURRENDERING THE CULTURE
“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
—Daniel Patrick Moynihan
It is often said that culture is upstream from politics, but what does that even mean? Edward Tylor, the founder of social anthropology, defined culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Putting aside the family, there are essentially three powerful spheres of life that primarily instill and reinforce these habits in modern America: academia, news media, and entertainment.
It’s reasonable to conclude that conservatives have lost all three.
It wasn’t always this way. MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer (California’s state Republican chairman!) enthusiastically promoted wholesome, patriotic values in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s.
But that was then. “Cultivating an appreciation for art, architecture, and the world of beauty used to be considered by a previous generation of conservatives the mark of a civilized person,” wrote Rod Dreher in Crunchy Cons, but “today it is often disdained by mainstream conservatives as an elitist pursuit.” Somewhere along the line, people with traditional values checked out of popular culture and retreated inward. The Left filled the vacuum, in some cases, by employing a coordinated effort over decades to infiltrate these important institutions. Rather than lament this development, some conservatives look down their noses at anyone who is too interested in cultural enrichment.
It’s hard to believe, but there was a time when cultural figures such as J. S. Bach, Anton Bruckner, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy represented, to varying degrees, Christian or conservative values in the cultural marketplace. As Christian writer Mark Noll noted, evangelicals “largely abandoned the universities, the arts, and other realms of ‘high’ culture.”
This is undoubtedly true, and the consequences were dire. But it’s not just high culture that matters; pop culture matters, too. During an August 2013 interview, an unlikely source from the rock world—former Smashing Pumpkins front man Billy Corgan—shared some interesting insight. During a CNN interview, Corgan recalled having been asked, “What’s the future of rock?” by a music magazine.
“My answer was, ‘God,’” Corgan said. “Social security is the third rail of politics in America. Well, God is the third rail in rock and roll.”
“You’re not supposed to talk about God,” he continued. “I think God’s the great, unexplored territory in rock and roll music. And I actually said that…and, of course, they didn’t put it in the interview.”
Rather than complain, Corgan suggests the solution is for Christians to “make better music” and “stop copying U2.”
This is good advice, but Corgan might not be familiar with the latest in Christian music. Indeed, it was once horrid, but, in fairness, it has gotten better. While contemporary Christian music of the 1990s mimicked secular music trends, newer Christian artists are refraining from compartmentalizing themselves as “Christian” artists—and are now presenting themselves as artists who are Christians. And, in doing so, they’re making better music (see Hillsong United, Gungor, Chris McClarney, Matt Redman, etc.). These are musicians whose themes and lyrics are informed by a Christian worldview, which may or may not be explicitly noted. This is a positive development that actually hearkens back to a bygone era.
Similar to the constant Christian struggle to be “in this world, but not of this world,” Christian conservatives must work to authentically engage the culture, instead of trying to ape what’s already popular. If this feels foreign, it’s partly because so many past conservatives viewed modern culture as inherently vulgar. And, of course, it is. But one wonders to what degree this was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s a catch-22, at least. You end up with a circular argument: Christians shouldn’t be involved in the culture because doing so can compromise their values. But what happens to the culture when Christians abandon it?
In the classic conservative book Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver writes at length about the horrors of jazz music, calling it “the clearest of all signs of our age’s deep-seated predilection for barbarism.” Today, most young conservatives are quite well versed in the world of music, and most would view jazz as tame and old-fashioned. When one considers Weaver’s rebuke, you have to wonder if this is a chicken-and-egg-type conundrum. Did we lose the culture because conservatives such as Weaver refused to accept and engage a truly American art form, or was Weaver a Cassandra in predicting jazz’s pernicious and corrupting influence? The latter theory seems laughable.
Yet, ironically, many of today’s conservatives are influenced by low culture. We might be enjoying a “golden age” of television, coming on the heels of excellent shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men. But for every smart show that challenges the intellect, there are ten vapid and cheaply produced “reality” shows on air. And, it seems, this influence has infected both conservatism (see the conservative affinity for Duck Dynasty) and Christianity. The anti-intellectualism of evangelicalism today is, itself, a species of pop evangelicalism, which is a subspecies of pop culture. The average evangelical has the same intellectual horizon as the nonbeliever who’s obsessed with American Idol. They are often one and the same. The only difference is that one has a fish and WWJD [What would Jesus do?] decal on his car and the other doesn’t. The answer is for conservatives to make good art, not necessarily to make conservative art.
Look at the Atlas Shrugged movie trilogy, which is based on the famous 1957 Ayn Rand novel. As film critic Dennis Harvey observed in Variety after seeing the third installment, “The spirit is willing but the film making is oh so weak.” It’s unfortunate that these films flopped. I’m not a huge Ayn Rand fan (she was, in fact, an atheist), but her famous novel contains some compelling free market ideas that even those of us who disagree with her secular worldview can find appealing. And yet, they were (ahem) not great movies. Conversely, The Dark Knight Rises, the edgy 2012 installment of the Batman superhero series, seemed to many to be an indictment of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Atlas Shrugged felt like overt propaganda; The Dark Knight Rises like a subtle political critique. Likewise, mainstream Hollywood films like Juno and Knocked Up—with their potent mix of highbrow comedy and lowbrow raunch—have arguably done more to subtly advance a pro-life message than any overt political propaganda ever could.
All Politics, All the Time
Interestingly, while conservatives were abandoning popular culture and academia, they were flocking to politics. The problem is that, in a democracy, once you’ve lost the cultural institutions, all political victories are temporary. “Conservatives are too apt to be obsessed by politics and to cede culture to their opponents,” says David Gelernter, Yale professor of computer science and author of America-Lite. “For a generation, conservatives have shrugged off education, and now they face a hard slog merely to defeat a grandiose failure of a left-liberal president in a disastrous economy, in dangerous times, in what is still a center-right nation. If this isn’t gross Republican incompetence, show me what is.”62
Not long ago, it would have been easy to chart the history of evangelical involvement with the GOP, and view it as a sine qua non. With the Left having become radicalized in the late 1960s, and on the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of Roe v. Wade in 1973, Christian conservatives were finally ready to respond. After backing Democrat Jimmy Carter, a self-declared born-again Christian in 1976, evangelicals were brought into the conservative coalition, helping propel Ronald Reagan to the presidency. And after televangelist Pat Robertson’s failed presidential bid in 1988, his activists formed the Christian Coalition, a group that was influential in helping Republicans win Congress in 1994—the first time they had controlled the House of Representatives in four decades. After George W. Bush took the White House in 2000—with the help of an energized Christian conservative base—his top aide, Karl Rove, dreamed of building a permanent Republican majority.
This dream was a mirage. And at least one man saw the writing on the wall before the rest. Back in 1999, conservative leader Paul Weyrich issued a controversial open letter declaring that conservatives “probably have lost the culture war.” Weyrich wrote:
In looking at the long history of conservative politics, from the defeat of Robert Taft in 1952, to the nomination of Barry Goldwater, to the takeover of the Republican Party in 1994, I think it is fair to say that conservatives have learned to succeed in politics. That is, we got our people elected.
But that did not result in the adoption of our agenda. The reason, I think, is that politics itself has failed. And politics has failed because of the collapse of the culture. The culture we are living in becomes an ever-wider sewer. In truth, I think we are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics.
At the time, Weyrich’s letter was criticized by many of his conservative pals, who had, after all, toiled in the trenches for years, first for Goldwater and then for Reagan. They were still optimistic we were on the verge of something big that would allow a conservative savior to finish what Reagan started. But today, it looks as though Weyrich was prescient. In fairness, he wasn’t the first to recognize the importance of the culture’s effect on politics. Years earlier, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society”—a sentiment later popularized by conservative new-media mogul Andrew Breitbart. But Weyrich was making an observation at a time when many dismissed such reflection as needlessly pessimistic. Conservatives kept telling themselves that winning elections and passing laws (often overturned by liberal judges) was tantamount to victory. And indeed, a year after Weyrich penned his pessimistic missive, George W. Bush was elected president.
It’s hard to argue with results. In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, Republicans did very well electorally. And a big part of that was due to the fact that evangelicals had joined the culture wars and were aligning with the GOP to win elections. Evangelicals thus went from the City of God to the City of Man—from being consumed with spiritual matters to being consumed with political matters—all the while largely ignoring the culture.
Since President Obama’s election in 2008, and with a few exceptions such as the 2010 and 2014 midterms, it has been especially depressing to be a conservative. In the past, one could more easily endure the ranting of liberal commentators by taking solace in that—outside of New York City and Washington, DC—most of the country was center-right. Whenever a liberal commentator said something angry or fringy, one could always console himself by saying (or at least thinking), “I hope you push that idea, because you’ll keep losing elections in real America.” I’m reminded of an exchange between former senator Alan Simpson and Bill Maher on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, which took place three days after George W. Bush’s reelection. Simpson said, “You’re making fun of Americans who have some religious bent, or a faith. Keep doing that and your people will never win an election. Because whether you and I like it or not, this is the only country on the face of the earth that was founded because of religious persecution and a belief in God—that’s why they left Europe.” Today, however, conservatives have made a shocking discovery: we are the ones in danger of appearing out of touch. While we were busy winning elections, our civilization became less traditional and more socially liberal. For every Republican elected to office, there were a dozen films or songs selling sex or drugs—many of which were far more entertaining than anything heard on C-SPAN. Again, culture is more important than politics, and politics will eventually reflect the culture.
Conservatives need to be able to talk about the culture without coming across like the angry old man shaking his fist and yelling, “Get off my lawn!” It won’t be easy—there is a missing ingredient. For this to work, more conservatives will have to ditch their 5-irons, put down their remotes, and infiltrate the intellectual elite. When you lose intellectuals, you lose popular culture and, before you know it, you’ve lost the culture war. And that’s where conservatives have been for a long time.
The Anti-Intellectual Strain in Evangelicalism
In addition to dumbing down conservatism, the anti-intellectual strain in evangelicalism is prompting conservatives to snub academia and in turn, the broader culture. The unintended consequence: a secular America where remaining both devout and relevant would become almost mutually exclusive.
For whatever reason, conservatives have an inclination toward activism that lends itself well to the worlds of politics, business, and economics, but not to the humanities or liberal arts. We saw this highlighted during the 2012 presidential campaign on several occasions. First, conservatives pounced when President Obama said, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” On one hand, this is an insulting thing to say about entrepreneurs who incur risk to build a business. But, as Claes G. Ryn, a professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, wrote at the Imaginative Conservative website in 2011 (a year before Obama uttered the “you didn’t build that” line), “If many businessmen in the Western world have exhibited admirable traits like honesty, good manners, and social responsibility, it is because, like others, they have been formed by an ancient civilization. They have been subject to the elevating pressures of priests, thinkers, aristocrats, teachers, and artists.” The point here is that culture is more important than politics and even business. Western civilization gave us institutions like the rule of law. Without these institutions, a businessman would not want to risk capital, because someone could always steal his business—or someone could simply refuse to pay him, and there would be no recourse. The implication presented by the Romney campaign was that business owners were somehow superior people—that there was no nobler endeavor than building a business. “In spite of America’s great universities on the intellectual side and its great symphonies and museums on the aesthetical side, to mention just a couple of relevant institutions, American life has a powerful utilitarian bias,” continued Ryn. “That predisposition is exemplified by an inordinate fascination with makers and doers and an inclination to look down on persons engaged in nonutilitarian, low-paying pursuits.”
Then They Came for Sports…
But it’s not just the more highbrow, avant-garde worlds of entertainment, the arts, and academia where conservatives have retreated. Aside from politics, conservatives have surrendered (or been outmaneuvered) in almost every facet of the culture, from the music industry to the worlds of food writing and travel writing—all of which are dominated by people of the Left. For conservatives, the final blow may prove to be the loss of sports as a conservative stronghold. Increasingly, it feels like liberalism is taking over our football stadiums and ballparks.
In the last few years, sports headlines have been dominated by stories like NBA player Jason Collins being celebrated for coming out as gay and Tim Tebow being derided for wearing his Christian faith on his sleeve, as well as debates over whether “Redskins” is a racial slur (with some outlets even refusing to use the name). More recently, members of the St. Louis Rams have come onto the field with their hands up—a symbol surrounding the death of an African American man in Ferguson, Missouri (a subsequent report issued by the Obama Justice Department concluded that Michael Brown did not, in fact, have his hands up). Even sports commentators are using their perch to advance progressive social engineering goals. In 2012, NBC sportscaster Bob Costas delivered a halftime gun control rant on the air (which was in response to the murder-suicide of NFL player Jovan Belcher), and in 2013, ESPN commentator Kevin Blackstone made reference to the national anthem as a “war anthem.”
“It’s funny to listen to sports commentators on the radio who have clearly been brought up through public schools and state university journalism programs talk about class and race and gender like a sociology major,” said R. J. Moeller, a conservative who also writes about sports and culture, when I interviewed him for a Daily Caller column on the subject. “They hate any strong male coaches. They hate any sort of patriotism associated with the sport. They’re treating sports and holding what goes on in locker rooms to the same standard they would a diversity and social justice mediation seminar on Google’s campus.” Moeller’s not alone in feeling this way. Other conservatives worry about the “feminization” of sports and the liberal tilt of modern sports coverage.
By first rejecting the culture and turning inward, and then focusing almost solely on politics, conservatives now find themselves increasingly shut out of major conversations that average Americans are interested in. The fact that this trend is continuing into the sports world is indicative of the extent of the problem. Ironically, though, having stupidly surrendered the culture war years ago, today’s culture warriors are too often employing aggressive counterproductive tactics that turn off some of the very people who ought to be cultural conservatives. In many cases, this involves overheated rhetoric, playing the victim card, and employing identity politics—in short, aping the worst characteristics conservative Americans have long attributed to the Left.
Checking Out of Politics
A couple of decades ago, the Christian Coalition provided ground troops for the conservative movement. But today, perhaps having seen what happened to their parents’ generation, many young Christians are choosing to be conscientious objectors in the culture wars. Some of this may be due to changing attitudes concerning some hot-button social issues. But there’s also a growing sense among young Christians that political involvement, no matter how pure the original motives, is a corrupting force. Christians, who attempt to be in this political world, but not of this political world, are constantly faced with ethical conundrums.
People have always made exceptions to their moral code in times of war. And what is politics but a bloodless war? But today, the warfare is asymmetrical. It’s done on Twitter and at political rallies. The line of demarcation between “civilians” and political operatives has vanished.
And the fighting never stops.
For Christians, political involvement is a double-edged sword. The real danger is that over time it has a coarsening effect. They are wise as serpents, but no longer innocent as doves. Many evangelicals now face a sort of catch-22. Their forefathers unwisely retreated from the culture, and now they’re being told that they have to abandon their temperament and values in order to take it back. In other words, we have to destroy the village to save it.
But what shall it profit a man if he should win the election but lose his soul?