Are the Culture Warriors Waning?

Frank Rich had a column in Sunday's New York Times which I enjoyed and thought very much on point, or at least I did until I learned yesterday that President Obama is lending credibility to and perhaps foolishly breathing some life into two notoriously hateful Christianist organizations that have been invited to the White House almost as if the Chimperator were still the president. Long term, I suspect Rich is still correct that the over all trend away from religion and the weakening of the power of the Christo-fascists is waning. The youngest generations of voters seem to be trending strongly away from the "culture wars" so loved by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson which have at their base a message of hatred against those who are different either religiously, racially, culturally, or in terms of sexual orientation. Personally, I believe it is important to hasten the demise of the divisive and hate based influence of the Christianist set from power particularly since their admitted goal is to more or less to strip freedom of religion and equality under the law from both state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution. Here are some highlights from Rich's column:

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SOMEDAY we’ll learn the whole story of why George W. Bush brushed off that intelligence briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” But surely a big distraction was the major speech he was readying for delivery on Aug. 9, his first prime-time address to the nation. The subject — which Bush hyped as “one of the most profound of our time” — was stem cells. For a presidency in thrall to a thriving religious right (and a presidency incapable of multi-tasking), nothing, not even terrorism, could be more urgent.

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What has happened between 2001 and 2009 to so radically change the cultural climate? Here, at last, is one piece of good news in our global economic meltdown: Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years. Culture wars are a luxury the country — the G.O.P. included — can no longer afford.

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In our own hard times, the former moral “majority” has been downsized to more of a minority than ever. Polling shows that nearly 60 percent of Americans agree with ending Bush restrictions on stem-cell research (a Washington Post/ABC News survey in January); that 55 percent endorse either gay civil unions or same-sex marriage (Newsweek, December 2008); and that 75 percent believe openly gay Americans should serve in the military (Post/ABC, July 2008).

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What’s been revealing about watching conservatives debate their fate since their Election Day Waterloo is how, the occasional [David] Frum excepted, so many of them don’t want to confront the obsolescence of culture wars as a political crutch. They’d rather, like Cantor, just change the subject — much as they avoid talking about Bush and avoid reckoning with the doomed demographics of the G.O.P.’s old white male base. To recognize all these failings would be to confront why a once-national party can now be tucked into the Bible Belt.

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The religious right is even more in denial than the Republicans. . . . [Tony] Perkins is now praying that economic failure will be a stimulus for his family-values business. “As the economy goes downward,” he has theorized, “I think people are going to be driven to religion.” Wrong again. The latest American Religious Identification Survey, published last week, found that most faiths have lost ground since 1990 and that the fastest-growing religious choice is “None,”

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Another highly regarded poll, the General Social Survey, had an even more startling finding in its preliminary 2008 data released this month: Twice as many Americans have a “great deal” of confidence in the scientific community as do in organized religion. How the almighty has fallen: organized religion is in a dead heat with banks and financial institutions on the confidence scale.

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This, too, is a replay of the Great Depression. “One might have expected that in such a crisis great numbers of these people would have turned to the consolations of and inspirations of religion,” wrote Frederick Lewis Allen in “Since Yesterday,” his history of the 1930s published in 1940. But that did not happen: “The long slow retreat of the churches into less and less significance in the life of the country, and even in the lives of the majority of their members, continued almost unabated.”

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History is cyclical, and it would be foolhardy to assume that the culture wars will never return. But after the humiliations of the Scopes trial and the repeal of Prohibition, it did take a good four decades for the religious right to begin its comeback in the 1970s. In our tough times, when any happy news can be counted as a miracle, a 40-year exodus for these ayatollahs can pass for an answer to America’s prayers.

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Perhaps Rich is too hard on some elements of organized religion - one of my tenants for instance, the assistant to Bishop for the Virginia Synod of the ELCA, oversees a number of amazing charity works that largely go unrecognized. On spiritual matters, however, I believe that the leadership of the ELCA and other mainline denominations are losing ground. In my opinion, they are increasingly sliding to irrelevance because they lack the courage to do what is right, are too hesitant to reject the divisive haters within their denominations, and fail to speak out against the most heinous conduct of the Christianist set.