The Next Culture War

I generally disagree with much of what David Brooks, conservative columnist for the New York Times has to say on most issues and I am well aware that he has signed on to speak before ultra-far right groups and has claimed ignorance when confronted with their homophobia and other nasty beliefs and agendas.  Once in a while he does get it right and in a column in the New York Times today, he gives good advice to the Christofascists on how they ought to move forward in the aftermath of last week's historic gay marriage ruling.  Will the leaders of "family values" a/k/a anti-gay hate groups, and right wing pastors heed his advice?  Most likely not, because their is more money to be raised by playing on the wholly unjustified persecution complex of their followers.  groups.  The net result will ultimately be an acceleration of Christianity's death spiral in America.  Here are column highlights:

Christianity is in decline in the United States. The share of Americans who describe themselves as Christians and attend church is dropping. Evangelical voters make up a smaller share of the electorate. Members of the millennial generation are detaching themselves from religious institutions in droves.

Christianity’s gravest setbacks are in the realm of values. American culture is shifting away from orthodox Christian positions on homosexuality, premarital sex, contraception, out-of-wedlock childbearing, divorce and a range of other social issues. More and more Christians feel estranged from mainstream culture. They fear they will soon be treated as social pariahs, the moral equivalent of segregationists because of their adherence to scriptural teaching on gay marriage. They fear their colleges will be decertified, their religious institutions will lose their tax-exempt status, their religious liberty will come under greater assault.

The Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision landed like some sort of culminating body blow onto this beleaguered climate.
Most Christian commentary has opted for another strategy: fight on. Several contributors to a symposium in the journal First Things about the court’s Obergefell decision last week called the ruling the Roe v. Wade of marriage. It must be resisted and resisted again.

These conservatives are enmeshed in a decades-long culture war that has been fought over issues arising from the sexual revolution. Most of the conservative commentators I’ve read over the past few days are resolved to keep fighting that war.

I would just ask them to consider a change in course. Consider putting aside, in the current climate, the culture war oriented around the sexual revolution.

Put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations from any consideration of religion or belief. Put aside an effort that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex. Put aside a culture war that, at least over the near term, you are destined to lose.

The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families. Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse. Those are the people who can help us think about how economic joblessness and spiritual poverty reinforce each other. Those are the people who converse with us about the transcendent in everyday life.

This culture war is more Albert Schweitzer and Dorothy Day than Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham; more Salvation Army than Moral Majority. It’s doing purposefully in public what social conservatives already do in private.

Consider a different culture war, one just as central to your faith and far more powerful in its persuasive witness.

[T]he sexual revolution will not be undone anytime soon. The more practical struggle is to repair a society rendered atomized, unforgiving and inhospitable. Social conservatives are well equipped to repair this fabric, and to serve as messengers of love, dignity, commitment, communion and grace.

Besides their bizarre  obsession with sex, the Christofascists will not follow this proposed course for another reason: many of the neighborhoods and people in need of the efforts Brooks proposes are black and minorities, and in the last analysis, many Christofascists are also racists.  They won't help those really in need.  Instead they will squander money on more lavish churches and salaries for their foul leaders to who actually livin out the Gospel social justice message is anathema.. 

A Ruling for Same-Sex Marriage Would Help Republicans

Should the U.S. Supreme Court rule that all state same sex marriage bans are unconstitutional, the Christofascists will go berserk - the always nauseating James Dobson has claimed a new civil war will erupt - but sane Americans will likely yawn and move on.  It's already happening in Virginia where even country clubs with long traditions of social conservatism are now accepting gay couples as members.  Ditto for yacht clubs such as the one the husband and I belong to.  The end result?  The Christofascists may lose some of their death grip over the Republican Party.  Perhaps not soon enough to stop them from poisoning the GOP primaries leading up to the 2016 presidential contest, but certainly over time.  A column in the New York Times lays out why a broad ruling in favor of marriage equality is the best thing the GOP establishment should be hoping for.  Here are highlights:

Many Republicans believe that their party needs to improve its image among the new generation of young and nonwhite voters who have helped President Obama win two terms. Yet there is a reason most Republican politicians have not tailored their positions on major issues toward younger voters: Doing so would risk angering the party’s base, which is predominantly old, white and culturally conservative.  Enter the Supreme Court.

With the legality of same-sex marriage being argued on Tuesday, the court could allow Republicans to abandon an unpopular position without abandoning their principles or risking a primary challenge. History would effectively be bailing out the party.

[I]f the Supreme Court rules that same-sex marriage bans are unconstitutional, the court could free Republicans from defending a policy that makes it far harder to confront their generational and demographic challenges.

A court ruling for national same-sex marriage could sharpen the debate over the subject in the short term. But it would end the state-by-state battles . . . . 

There’s no guarantee that the Republicans would accept history’s offering. As my colleague Adam Nagourney points out, opposition to same-sex marriage could become a powerful issue for conservative presidential candidates like Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum or Ted Cruz, who have big incentives to appeal to the socially conservative voters that dominate the Iowa caucuses.

Without a ruling, it is hard to imagine the Republicans abandoning their opposition to same-sex marriage anytime soon. Polls show that two-thirds of Republicans continue to oppose same-sex marriage, in no small part because white evangelical Christians, who oppose same-sex marriage by a three-to-one margin, make up around 40 percent of Republicans.

But over the medium term, a Supreme Court ruling would probably resolve the debate over same-sex marriage and push it to the sidelines. There are big reasons Republicans would benefit. As many as 60 percent of adults support same-sex marriage, and the margin is even larger among young voters.

If Republicans don’t make a big effort to make gains among nonwhite voters, or if they do but fail, they’ll need to broaden their appeal among white voters. That might require them to do better among relatively secular voters than they have in the past.

For all of the focus on the “white working class” or the “gender gap” or the urban-rural divide, the real fissure among white voters is along religious lines. The divide between white evangelical Christians and nonreligious white voters is about as large as the gap between white and nonwhite voters, and it dwarfs the education, income, gender or regional gaps.

The growing nonwhite share of the electorate has played a well-documented role in eroding the viability of the traditional G.O.P. path to the presidency, but the growing number of non-Christian white voters — the religiously unaffiliated, atheists, agnostics, Jews and others — will pose a problem as well.

Among voters under age 45, there were fewer evangelical voters than non-Christian whites, according to a compilation of pre-election surveys of nearly 14,000 respondents. Among 18-to-29-year-olds, white non-Christians outnumbered white evangelicals by a five-point margin. In comparison, evangelicals outnumbered non-Christians by a three-to-one margin among non-Hispanic whites over age 65.

[A]s younger, less Christian voters age and their turnout rises, it becomes harder to imagine the Republicans continuing to compensate with higher turnout and support among white evangelicals. 

If Republicans are running out of room to expand their margins among evangelical voters, then additional gains among white voters will have to come from nonevangelicals. And if you assume that cultural issues are the principal reason white voters break so strongly along cultural lines, then further Republican gains among white voters could be well served by a strategic retreat from same-sex marriage.