First, a personal notice. I’m leaving tomorrow morning for a Scandinavian festival in Stromsburg, Nebraska, so I won’t be posting anything. Be strong.
Over at The American Culture, where I cross-post now and then, Mike D’Virgilio has some thoughtful comments on the historical revisionism—distressingly popular among young evangelicals—that blames the “culture wars” in America on conservatives. I suppose if you weren’t around at the time, you can be excused for believing that kind of nonsense.
Below, a short history of religion in America as I suppose it’s taught in schools nowadays. (In case you’re new to this blog, the material below is satire. If you don’t know what satire is, look it up.)
In the beginning, an earnest group of Deists founded the United States. In order to protect the country from the fearful ravages of religion, they included in the first amendment of the Constitution a guarantee that the right to religion, and “the free exercise thereof,” might not be infringed upon by the government. Why they expressed it quite that way, when their clear purpose was to protect the people from all public expression of religion, remains a mystery.
Throughout the course of our nation’s history, religion has always been taboo in public life. No public figure ever prayed, or called for prayer, or defended his policies on the basis of the Bible. That was not done. The average citizen, in fact, never entered a church, and had no idea what the Bible has to say.
Throughout the greatest crises of our nation, the idea of calling on God was never even considered. The movement to abolish slavery, led by such stalwart secularists as Sojourner Truth, John Brown, and Rev. (the Rev. stood for Revisionist) Henry Ward Beecher, proudly proclaimed the equality of all people based on evolutionary science. Julia Ward Howe’s classic song, “The Battle Ballad of the Republic,” with its classic lines, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the horde,” expressed the humanitarian, humanist philosophy that united Americans (even when they were shooting at each other).
In the late 19th Century, the entirely secular Progressive Movement found a presidential candidate in that staunch secularist, William Jennings Bryan (who, probably under the influence of a brain lesion, later became the only American of his generation to question the theory of evolution). Another progressive cause was Prohibition, spearheaded by the entirely secular Women’s Skeptical Temperance Union.
It wasn’t until the 1950s that an insidious conspiracy of Christian fundamentalists wormed its way into American life, and started banning a lot of traditional freedoms that Americans had always cherished, like abortion and gay marriage. Where these religious fanatics came from is a mystery, since such people had never before been seen in this country. But it is the duty of all patriotic Americans to oppose them in their crusade to take away our precious constitutional rights to “choice, security, and the guarantee of happiness.” (This original wording from the Declaration of Independence has recently been restored by the Federal Department of Deconstruction Criticism.)
As General Custer once said, “The west would be nice, peaceful place, if those Indians hadn’t sneaked in and started causing trouble.”
As a descendant of white indentured servants, as well as the Mayflower community, I feel compelled to express a perspective. America has never and will never be a place that can be neatly categorized apart from being accurately called an Immigrant country. From the very beginning the Religious Exiles from across the Atlantic had very different visions of religion and its practice. The Pilgrim upheld individual conscience, while the Puritan upheld collective conformity, and that breach of understanding was never bridged and became an american cultural tradition. The Puritans eventually fell into despair as their vision of establishing a shining beacon on a hill was ignored by most colonists as they pursued free enterprise making up the rules as they went along. However, despite that, a living legacy of Christian Morality prevailed, despite continued Religious Intoleration and Persecution, and a Christian Civilization was firmly established in America by pioneering families and their communities alongside of humanism of the Enlightenment. America continues to be work in progress continuing to unfold…
Ah, yes, the “Battle Ballad”! I was singing it just yesterday.
Lars, you had me at “The Battle Ballad of the Republic.” Truly hilarious, sir.
I don’t see Evangelicals as blaming the culture wars on Conservatives. (I, as a left-leaning Evangelical, have yet to deny the existence of the 1960’s, their leftist irresponsibility, and the violence of its culture wars.) However, I do blame many aspects of our contemporary corruption of Christianity (and, with the advent of prosperity theology, at least one outright heresy) on the culture wars, and white Evangelicalism’s decision to place their ultimate faith in restoring civilization rather than in following Christ. I think others have also said similar things.
The question isn’t who started the culture wars. The question is how Christianity should respond to it. The fiscally conservative Prosperity Gospel (wealth equals virtue) and left-wing rejections of the gospel are of course the two most obvious places where people decided to throw away the Gospel in order to focus on their side of the culture war. But I think there are temptations to people of many political affiliations to bunker down and dig battle-lines, often lines which exclude vast chunks of scriptures.
(Case in point: I’ve been to a number of churches that both preach about (1) the clear Scriptural depictions of the need to protect the poor and resist the corruptions of power, and (2) the need for individuals to submit their bodies to God’s law and avoid sexual immorality. But it’s always hard to find someone who doesn’t want to throw out one of those two scriptural priorities, because the call of our current power-struggles is more important than allegiance to the Scriptures.)
At some point, I’d like liberals and conservatives to stop whining that “they started it” and start focusing on the way Christ calls us to live within a presumed corrupt (yet divinely ordained) political situation.
For me, the real objection to the culture wars is that I feel that the abortion issue was a carrot leading me to associate Christianity with the invasions of various countries, economic deregulation, reckless abandonment of environmental stewardship, revisionist views of America (I don’t see a difference between sanitized leftist or right-wing histories of America–most are blatantly deceptive when talking about a good number of our founding fathers), and ungracious moralism.
Now one may be a Christian and believe that economic deregulation is a good thing, or that we need a strong international military presence to promote democracy around the world, or that the call to be stewards to the environment is already rightfully answered in our current business as usual. Those issues are, in my understanding, mostly pragmatic–Jesus had very little to say about the free rider effect, and nothing to say about the policies of the Fed. But when these issues get tied to people’s perspectives on the Gospel, so that people grow up believing that environmentalism and labor unions are *inherently unchristian*, then the situation is ripe for justified backlash (and, alas, its unjustified and ill-conceived companions.)
However, I will grant that the article linked, written by Timothy Dalrymple, is both generous, on-target, and charitable.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/philosophicalfragments/2012/06/11/if-youre-selling-scorn-for-conservative-christians-the-market-is-hot/
LOL! “Deconstruction Criticism” — way to jump into an academic battle that climaxed around 1987! Stick it to those intellectualz!
Rambler, with all due respect, it seems to me that whenever liberals are caught out doing things they’d condemn in others, they always reply, “Nobody’s actually saying that–the real issue is [whatever].” It’s my experience (and obviously D’Virgilio’s) that they are saying this, and pretty often.
For instance, I often see people on Facebook saying, “Why are conservative Christians so obsessed with gay marriage?” As if we brought the subject up. As if gay marriage were a neutral baseline from which we suddenly deviated for no discernable reason. This springs from ignorance of the history of the culture wars.
And Jeff, you ought to be aware that any federal department, once established, never goes away.
Lars,
If we judge a political movement–ANY political movement–on the basis of its Facebook supporters, then I weep for humanity.
I’ve often heard conservative Christians say that Muslims are united in a conspiracy to destroy America (all of them), that every poor person is poor precisely because of his or her personal sins and for no other reason, that wealth reflects one’s virtue, that we should stone homosexuals to death, that women should not work outside the home if they are married, that husbands should tell their wives how to vote, and that interracial marriage, while not technically wrong, should never happen.
Then, of course, there’s the non-Christian cult of Ayn Rand, who have expounded to me passionate arguments that all charity–government, individual, personal–is morally repugnant.
All of this came from a very small number of very angry people. I would never consider this a just reason to condemn conservative beliefs, in their entirety. If I do make a blanket argument against “conservativism,” it will be against either a specific famous person and that person’s philosophy (I admit my distaste for Ayn Rand’s reheated Nietzschean arguments is not entirely rational) or it will be a critique that addresses intelligent, well-respected individuals.
The question “why are conservative Christians so obsessed with gay marriage?”, on the other hand, does have some very good answers. (Well, one: they want to submit themselves to the full authority of Scriptures, and they feel this includes not voting to allow certain violations of the Scriptures.) But I don’t think most people asking about it are thinking about history. Instead, they probably limit Christianity to its central attitudes (substitutionary atonement, love God/love others, &c.), and are trying to look at the question as an individual reading the Bible at the current moment.
In short, people aren’t thinking “oh, it was so good to be gay before the culture wars.” They’re thinking “okay, so there’s this big debate about public homosexuality, but why should the church get involved now?”
Speaking as someone who leans left, I recognize that America has always had a rich strand of Christianity in it, which I believe has mostly been used by God for good (though sometimes coopted by man, as with spurious theologies declaring black people to be descendents of Cain, &c.) I also recognize a rich strand of do-it-yourself agnosticism and skepticism, most eloquently (if sometimes tastelessly) affirmed by folks like Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, and Thomas Jefferson (though yes, the last did participate in that old strand of upper-class agnosticism that saw watered-down religion as important for keeping a reign on the common man.) In between, I see my childhood hero Teddy Roosevelt. I sometimes felt he was more liberal theologically than I am (he seemed, often, not to care what religion one had, as long as you had a belief that kept you healthy and productive). Nonetheless, his speeches and autobiography often sound shockingly contemporary: he wanted the government to institute policies closing the income gap and protecting our wild beauties, though he also saw the rich individualism of the hunter/explorer/soldier to be central to what made America great, and wasn’t afraid to exert our power abroad.
Thus every time I hear a conservative or liberal talk about America’s history, I feel that they aren’t trying to tell the truth but rather are trying to fight with the other side. In some ways, this is always how history gets told–but it annoys me. It annoys me worse when people are stereotyping the other side’s propaganda; I feel like I am watching a Greatest Hits show of horrific distortions of our nation’s checkered past.
I object to the suggestion, which I see everywhere, that conservative Christians started the culture wars. Say what you like. We’re the Indians. You’re the settlers.
I agree–conservative Christians didn’t start the culture wars.
But I think they/we (I consider myself theologically conservative while politically liberal) should be considerate about the way they treat their enemies, while not expecting their enemies to show equal consideration.
I don’t see how asking people to treat others with the same consideration they demand for themselves is out of line.