Essay question:  Two prompts available. Answer only one.  300-450 words in length only (slightly shorter than the Reaction Paper minimum length).  Answers should include at least two citations to assigned reading in this course.  Citations may be parenthetical or footnotes, but they must include the name of the author and a page number.    40 points

A.  Examine the two images below and explain how they helped cause controversy in the culture wars. Your answer should identify the art by artist and title (if possible) and also define the basic idea of the culture wars, including how these particular images sparked a reaction.

B.   This course focuses on divided culture. Explain why artwork that challenges traditional views regarding sexuality, the body, or gender roles has sparked several culture war battles. 

A CULTURE

DIVIDED

America’s Struggle for Unity

DAVID TREND

Paradigm Publishers

Boulder • London

A�tifURE DIVIDED

btiltural conformity. Indeed, to some theorists such an obsession with
an articulated “common culture” has become synonymous with the
integrity of national identity itself In this context then, the form of
democracy we now face becomes “radical” in at least two senses of
the term. Not only does it imply a fundamental rejection of mono­
lithic party politics in favor of broader models based on identity
groupings, but it also suggests the rejection of a set of national
accords seen by many to constitute the very glue that holds. the
nation together. These two factors make possible the type of new
spaces for engagement and new definitions of citizenship that radical
democracy implies.

In other writings I have sought to delineate the problems pro­
duced by the binary epistemology of Enlightenment humanism
across a range of disciplinary fields: photography, film, television,
education, music, and new media.18

The roots of this enlightenment model are perhaps nowhere more
dearly articulated than in philosopher George W. F. Hegel’s phe­
nomenology, which mapped out a basic theory subject/object rela­
tions. Hegel postulated an abstract dyad of the self and other,
constructed in the consciousness of individuals. Within this idealized
rendering, the subject envisions an external object that it comes to
recognize as different from itsel£ This difference produces a dissatis­
faction that prompts the subject to absorb the attributes of the exter­
nal other. He termed this process “sublation.”19 According to Hegel,
sublation was the motor force of human learning, as the subject is
changed through the appropriatipn of new ideas and objects. What is
important to remember is that this dialectic was a pure function of
metaphysics. Although Hegel’s fundamental subject/object dualism
was replicated for many decades in western philosophies and institu­
tions, it was not a model of the world–as contemporary feminist,
poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories have made dear. Indeed,
it is now increasingly evident that it is less productive to view social
relations in binary “either/or” terms than in multiple “ands.”

CHAPTER THREE

Belief

Faith in What?

I
N THE 2000s the topic of values reemerged in public discourse as
a point of contention between liberals and conservatives, as well as
a rallying call for moral absolutists. The values debate has emerged

most strongly in debates over “good” and “evil” in people’s lives and
on the international stage. In the 2000 presidential race, George W.
Bush ran on a platform of moral platitudes, echoed in his victory
speech by imploring Americans to vanquish “evil” from the world
and “teach our children values.” 1 While President Barack Obama has
expressed his values in more nuanced terms, Obama’ s appeals for
dialogue, tolerance, and responsibility convey a distinct moral pro­
gram. All political agendas implicitly convey definitions of “right”
and “wrong,” imploring citizens to accept one set of such definitions
over others. Framing issues of right and wrong in terms of good and
evil intensifies the rhetoric of the discussion, evoking a heightened
emotionalism and sometimes the specter of impending threat.

Throughout American history the nation’s enemies frequently
have been portrayed as evil-and such characterizations often have
underpinned rationales for military action and war. Franklin Roose­
velt led the United States into World War II for the purpose of
fighting a great “evil.” Ronald Reagan called America’s Cold War
enemies “the focus of evil in the world.” 2 This rhetoric again went
into high gear following the attacks of September 11, 2001, when
President Bush labeled Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an “axis of
evil.” It would be easy to dismiss these remarks as simple political

55

56 A CULTURE DIVIDED

posturing, lest we forget that George Bush won the presidency
twice and Republicans gained the support of many in other elec­
tions. The language of good and evil resonates powerfully in the
minds of voters because such concepts are deeply ingrained in pub­
lic consciousness.

Concepts of good and evil are fundamental to Western philoso­
phy, dating to pre-Socratic times. In both Eastern and Western phi­
losophy, these ideas are found at least as early as 500 BCE. The
philosophies of Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, and the subse­
quent doctrines of Christianity all hinged on a fundamental dualism
between the good or “the way” and evil or “falseness.” Indeed, orga­
nized religion has functioned as an important institution of moral
education throughout history. It has guided civilizations in their pur­
suits of peace as well as war. In some systems, goodness is seen as the
natural state of humankind, with evil entering as an aberration. In
the biblical account of the creation of humanity, Adam and Eve are
initially innocent, existing in a sort of blissful ignorance. A serpent
appears who convinces the pair to disobey God and consume fruit
from the tree of knowledge, saying, “Eat thereof, then your eyes shall
be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”3 Thus
Adam and Eve begin their encounters with sin. In some systems,
good and evil are transposed with notions of truth and falseness.
Socrates is remembered for his belief that certain great truths exist
and humanity’s task is to understand them. Plato, regarded by many
as the most influential figure in Western philosophy, asserted that
values such as absolute beauty and goodness exist in “ideal forms”
that people can never truly lmow, but they can experience through
copies manifest in things seen in the world. Unlike Socrates, who
believed in many truths, Plato argued that there exists one basic
tr uth-“the good” -to which people should aspire. Because the
world we experience is but a realm of copies of “goodness,” these
copies render understandings that are always imperfect and can
sometimes be evil.

Some psychologists argue that concepts of good and evil are hard­
wired into our brains. George Lakoff writes that such values are part
of the basic architecture of thinking manifest in early childhood. In
Lakoff’s view, much of the way we think is organized by “deep
frames” or fundamental concepts in the unconscious, which we

BELIEF 57

develop through repeated exposure to ideas. Deep frames “structure
how you view the world,” Lakoff explains.4 They characterize the
moral and political principles that are so deep they are part of our
very identities. “Deep framing is the conceptual infrastructure of the
mind: the foundation, walls, and beams of that edifice.”5 The surface
thinking that goes with everyday experience, conversation, and
media are effective to the extent they fit only within deep frames.

Owing to their centrality in human belief systems, concepts of
good and evil have functioned as central elements in storytelling
throughout history. Ancient myths, prehistoric renderings, early lit­
erature, and religious writings all depend on the simple opposition of
good and evil in creating dramatic tension and conveying meaning­
ful narratives. Most fairy tales and children’s stories hinge on a
simple opposition of good and evil values. Characters encounter evil
witches, giants, or monsters. Peter Pan fought Captain Hook, Harry
Potter battled Voldemort, and Superman faced dozens of bad guys. It
doesn’t take much insight to recognize the transparent moralizing in
myths and children’s stories. Most of these narratives function both
to entertain and to instruct. This is because the stories always come
from adults who see them as a vehicle for instilling values in children.
As Jack Zipes writes, “There never has been a literature conceived by
children for children, a literature that belongs to children.”6 Zipes
points that children, when left to their own devices, often do not cre­
ate stories of menacing bad guys who are overcome by virtuous fig­
ures. Instead they recreate other forms of play in their narratives.
Keep in mind that children not only don’t write most children’s sto­
ries, but they also don’t frequently select and purchase the books,
CDs, or videos. The choices come from the well-intentioned adults
who make the decisions for children and hence create the cultural
realm their children inhabit.

The moralizing in children’s culture helps create a good versus
bad worldview that sets the stage for a binary understanding of the
world. But it would be a mistake to attribute this black-and-white
worldview to fairy tales alone. Underlying this binary worldview are
deeper philosophical structures that undergird human consciousness
itself Before the Western enlightenment that emerged at the end of
the Middle Ages, the opposition of life and death was manifest in the
dualism between God and humankind, between heaven and earth,

58 A CULTURE DIVIDED

expressed in human experience in the division of man and woman.
Plato wrote of the opposition of the corporeal and the spiritual. In
the 1500s Nicolas Copernicus and Francis Bacon drew distinctions
between science (fact) and religion (belief ). Two centuries later Rene
Descartes formulated his famous mind/body dualism, writing that
“the mind is completely distinct from the body: to wit, that matter,
whose essence is extension in space, is always divisible, whereas the
mind is utterly indivisible.”7 Later philosophers parsed the various
kinds of realities and images that the mind could formulate, as dis­
tinctions were drawn between perception and imagination, reason
and emotion. Dualism could not have grown to such a large concept
if it did have a use and importance. From early childhood through
adulthood, the concept of opposing ideas, concepts, and values
forms the basis of people’s ability to see difference, draw distinctions,
and engage in critical thought. It underlies legality and illegality,
knowledge and ignorance, progress and the lack thereof Many see
dualism as the essence of humanity and human thought.

But dualism has in fact been the rascal of human consciousness.
Its apparent ubiquity and universal applicability have led people and
civilizations to believe it is the only way of viewing the world. To
many people, knowing the difference between good and bad is the
very essence of traditionalism that passes ethical values from genera�
tion to generation. Inabilities to make clear, black-and-white distinc­
tions in decision making and assigning value often have been seen as
failures in judgment, insight, conviction, even courage. Knowing the
difference between right and wrong is viewed by many as an essential
element of adult consciousness and civilized society. What this tradi­
tionalist perspective fails to realize is that duality is in fact but one
way of viewing the world. It is in many ways an abstraction or even a
fiction conceived about existence. T here are many degrees of value
that lie between truth and untruth. T here are many shades of moral­
ity and immorality between good and evil, just as there are many
kinds of people. Admitting the shades of light and dark that exist
between black-and-white distinctions obviously requires a more
complex thought process, one that recognizes ambiguity and partial
answers to questions. President Bill Clinton was criticized by politi­
cal conservatives for his resistance to dogmatic beliefs, and his presi­
dency even was termed a “gray era” for this reason.

BELIEF 59

But in the post-Bush years, shades of gray seem to be making a
comeback. Recent elections have shown both Democrats and Repub­
licans stepping over each other in efforts to stake out centrist posi­
tions, keeping voters nearly evenly divided in many races. Media
critics have noted the decline of traditional “good” and “bad” charac­
ters in TV and movies, and the rising popularity of “antiheroes.”
Most frequently cited is the family man and mafia kingpin at the
center of the long-running cable series, The Sopranos. Viewers never
could decide whether to love or hate Tony, who strangled another
mobster while touring colleges with his daughter. Jack Bauer of 24,
Don Draper of Mad Men, Patty Hewes of Damages, and Dexter
Morgan of Dexter all manifest similar blends of heroism and selfish­
ness, virtue and dishonesty. Joshua Alston wrote that the Bush presi­
dency “primed audiences for antihero worship, that in the midst of a
war started with faulty intelligence, suspected terrorists sent to black
sites and a domestic eavesdropping program, it’s no wonder we
would be interested in delving deeply into the true motives underly­
ing the actions of powerful people. “8 Is this emerging pattern in
media preferences evidence of changing public attitudes-perhaps a
new moment in American consciousness–or simply another pendu­
lum swing in popular taste?

Absolutism and Relativism

“Absolutism” is the belief that there are concrete standards against
which moral questions can be judged, and that certain actions are
right or wrong, regardless of the context in which they occur. Abso­
lutism is often contrasted with moral “relativism,” which asserts that
moral truths are contingent upon social or historical circumstances.
Absolutists believe that morals are inherent in the laws of the uni­
verse, the nature of humanity, or the will of God. From this perspec­
tive, all actions can be evaluated as either inherently moral or
immoral. For example, an unprovoked war might be deemed a moral
act by an absolutist.

Relativists eschew absolute black-and-white answers to questions.
Rather than applying a fixed set of good or bad definitions that
always apply in judgments, relativists often argue that new answers to
questions must be created for every situation. What is true in one

60 A CULTURE DIVIDED

situation might not be true in another. For example, an absolutist
view of the family might say that only conventional nuclear families,
gender roles, and childrearing practices are universally valid, and that
single-parent families, working mothers, or extended family models
aren’t good. A relativist approach would say that different kinds of
families work in different situations. Some people criticize relativist
views, especially when it comes to families, as too tolerant. Oppo­
nents to relativism say that such thinking allows important standards
to be abandoned and leads people into undisciplined lifestyles. By
some accounts, the origination of relativism can be dated to Protago­
ras (481-420 BC), who took issue with popular beliefs of the time
that human beings should aspire to godlike ethical perfection. Argu­
ing for a more flexible approach to morality, Protagoras wrote that
“man is the measure of all things.”9

Nearly eighty years ago, C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud famously
debated moral absolutism versus relativism. Much of the discussion
involved a disagreement over the existence of God and the impor­
tance of science. Lewis, born an Irish Christian and the author of the
seven-book Chronicles of Narnia (1949-1954) series, asserted that
science could not adequat<;:ly explain the mysteries of the creation and workings of the universe. 10 Lewis wrote, "We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind what makes it what it is." 11 To Lewis, the only answer is that there must be a God who made the world and gave people the principles of moral law. Lewis believed that certain truths are hardwired into human consciousness, evi­ denced in the way codes of behavior-including abilities to discern right from wrong-replicate themselves from culture to culture and throughout human history. Freud, whose parents were Moravian Jews, contended that God was a mental fabrication that obscured the fact that moral conventions emerge from human experience. To Freud, morality is made up by people for practical reasons. Human­ ity discovers moral laws the way it came upon mathematics, through observation and reasoning. People are born as blank slates. Moral precepts are passed from adults to children through educational processes. Both Lewis and Freud argued about German Nazism. Lewis argued that the Nazis had mistakenly adopted an alternate reality in which they strayed from God, deceived into forgetting a

BELIEF 61

morality they had originally recognized. For Freud, the Nazis proved
that people could learn evil rather than goodness. Freud argued that
the solution to Nazism was not religious virtue, but a superior system
of reason.

Idealism, Realism, and Pluralism

Further insights into the debate over absolutism and relativism are
found in the philosophies of idealism and realism. Idealists resemble
absolutists in embracing tradition as a central value-a kind of
anchor. Idealism argues that we perceive the world from an enduring
perspective that transcends all other points of view. Idealism holds
that reality is mind-correlative or mind-coordinated. To idealists,
tangible objects are not independent of the conscious mind but exist
only through processes of intellectual operations. The everyday world
of things and people is not the “real” world but a representation as it
appears to be. Late eighteenth-century idealist Hegel argued that an
internal spirit guides all perceptions, including human reason. Hegel
described a “world-soul,” existing through all history, which emerges
from a process now known as the Hegelian dialectic. A contempo­
rary of Hegel’s, Immanuel Kant, wrote that the mind shapes our per­
ceptions of the world to take form in both time and space. Kant
believed that all we can know are mental impressions of an outside
world. Such mental impressions may or may not exist independently
from the “real” because we can never access that outside world
directly.

Idealists view people as governed by universal truths to which
they should always aspire but can never achieve. T hese transcenden­
tal values exist for all time and apply to all people, regardless of their
historical circumstance or cultural heritage. In social terms, idealists
tend to put their emphasis on behavior, attributing human success
or failure to attitudes people bring to their exercise of free will. T hus
values like paternal authority and marriage are held up as goals to
which everyone should subscribe. Idealists see a fundamental cor­
rectness in existing arrangements but fear its enabling values are
eroding. T his is the logic that argues that job discrimination, sexual
harassment, and unfair housing practices really aren’t that much of a
problem, and the government programs to rectify them provide

62 A CULTURE DIVIDED

inegalitarian preferences upon which “minority” groups become
dependent. Great importance is afforded to cultural issues, as mani­
fest in controversies over literary canons, artistic censorship, and the
labeling of records and video games. Culture is seen as the embodi­
ment of these timeless values, not the reflection of everyday life or
work. Idealist culture manifests itself in chosen lists of” great books”
and masterpiece artworks housed in special preserves of aesthetic
contemplation. Separated from the exigencies of daily life, art is
seen as devoid of political content or implication. Ironically, rarely is
any consideration given to the corrupting influence of a market that
emphasizes competition, greed, and wealth as measures of human
worth.

Realism assumes that reality inheres in everyday experience and
that its functions can be accessed and known. Attending to immedi­
ate circumstances in this way, realists often embrace relativism.
Because what we know derives from the here and now, realism relies
on descriptions of objects and environments. Realism recognizes the
importance of ordinary observations and events. It tends to reject
idealistic views of the heroic and transcendental. In the early 1600s,
realist philosopher Descartes asserted that knowledge derives from
the senses, and that we understand abstractions by relating them to
our actual experiences of the world. Writing in the latter half of the
seventeenth century, John Locke likewise asserted that a perceivable
world exists “out there,” which has certain qualities that underlie our
broader understandings and knowledge.

Realists see truth emerging from the lived experiences of human
beings. As such, realists recognize that values develop differently
from culture to culture and from era to era. Rules about gender rela­
tionships or family structures are not permanently fixed but need to
be evaluated in the context of changing social needs. Realists are
often critical of a society they believe is emphasizing greed and com­
petition rather than social justice. As a consequence, realists promote
government programs to correct the inequities produced by market
forces. Rather than attempting to manipulate people into adopting
social norms, realists seek ways of broadening society to be more
indusive–more tolerant of diversity and difference. Instead of blam­
ing people in need for their circumstances, realists are more likely to
favor a fundamental redistribution of wealth through such measures

BELIEF 63

as assistance programs, government subsidies, and progressive tax
legislation. Arguments that some people might lack motivation or
require forms of moral education are rejected as biased. This funda­
mentally redistributive program has made realists (who generally
ascribe to liberal social politics) vulnerable to the charge that they
simply want to throw resources at problems. As realist Molly Ivins
jokingly stated, “This may sound simple, but the real problem with
poor people is that they don’t have enough money. ” 12 To realists, cul­
ture is found in many places from the gallery to the classroom to the
street. Because culture is found in the daily encounters people have
with one another, it can be used to educate citizens and improve
their living conditions. Because it is tied to daily life, culture always
bears political implications.

In their postures of mutual exclusion, both idealist and realist
camps hold part, but not all, of the means to understand social prob­
lems. The inadequacy of such polarized thinking became apparent in
the 1990s with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and
the evaporation of the Soviet threat. The George W. Bush years sig­
naled a return to black-and-white reasoning. Yet as the 2008 elec­
tions demonstrated, Bush’s failure to acknowledge a more nuanced
vision didn’t dick with the voting public. Approaches to politics that
would separate issues into neat categories-like the separation of
economic structure from cultural behavior-no longer seemed
viable.

One way to reconcile idealism and realism is through the doctrine
of pluralism. W illiam E. Connolly writes at length about this distinc­
tion, argµing that although realists reject the idea of a single doctrine
that applies to all people, they eventually must make dear choices in
specific situations. 1 3 Hence, a realist who opposes the general princi­
ple of capital punishment might accept the death penalty for an espe­
cially heinous crime such as terrorism. In contrast, pluralists always
keep multiple options in play and would not necessarily practice an
idealist “eye for an eye” approach to evil. Pluralism is difficult to
practice because it requires the energy and restraint to maintain mul­
tiple perspectives in one’s mind. Moreover, pluralism cannot eter­
nally vacillate between options. To do so would render it unable to
take any action. Instead pluralism strives to maintain an awareness of
options before, during, and afi:er an action takes place. As Connolly

64 A CULTURE DIVIDED

writes, pluralism “encourages us to embrace certain things in this
particular place, to be indifferent to some, to be wary of others, and
to fight militantly against the continuation of yet others.”14

But not all versions of pluralism are created equal. The impetus
for pluralism has historical roots in the liberal discontent with large
government bureaucracies. Historically, this difficulty was exacer­
bated by the social diversification and class stratification brought
on by industrialization. In the post-World War II era, theorists in
Europe and the United States began to argue that forms of plural­
ism that pitted individuals against the state oversimplified the idea
of citizenship. Specifically, this thinking failed to consider differ­
ences among people based on issues of gender, race, national origin,
age, or sexual orientation. Perhaps more importantly, postwar plu­
ralism failed to recognize the permeability of the categories public
and private.

Poststructuralist theorists of the 1990s saw this dumping of ideas
into either public or private domains as a return to one-dimensional
modernist thinking. Not only did postwar U.S. pluralists reinforce
conventional public/private categories, but they also were incapable
of recognizing the subjects of politics as anything besides members of
discrete groups; Postwar pluralism marked a significant advance over
unreconstructed liberalism in carving out a larger role and a more
complex arena for citizens to act politically, but it did so only within
existing understandings of civic roles. Ernesto Ladau and Chantal
Mouffe proposed what they termed a “radical democratic” reconcep­
tualization of the citizen unencumbered by old categories of the
modernist self Rather than a unified and autonomous member of a
particular group, within this formulation each person belongs to
numerous overlapping groups and multiple intersecting identities. As
Mouffe explains, “It is not a matter of establishing a mere alliance
between given interests, but of actually modifying their identity to
bring about a new political identity.”15 In this “poststructuralist plu­
ralism” individuality is maintained because of the relatively unique
mix of associations within each person.

Although it remains to be implemented in contemporary politics,
the poststructuralist approach to pluralism has become manifest in
the growing influence of advocacy groups in politics-enabled in the
2000s by decentralized technologies such as the Internet. By opening

BELIEF 65

new realms of public discourse, this networked pluralism gives fresh
vitality to the impetus for democratic principles. The politicization
of social spaces formerly considered neutral makes apparent the often
unacknowledged power relations in everyday activities. In this way,
such “off-limits” territories as popular culture, education, and the
family become sites of critical investigation and emancipatory con­
test. Rather than diminishing political involvement, radical demo­
cracy helps people see political opportunities everywhere.

Obviously the task ahead is far from easy. The polarizing effects of
conventional “liberal” versus “conservative” views of politics make
life difficult for alternative thinking. This dualistic view is encour­
aged by an electoral process that produces a rhetoric of mandates and
landslides from narrow margins of the vote similar to those put forth
in recent presidential elections. Our current winner-take-all process
yields little understanding of the important relationship between
minority and majority stockholders in participatory government.
This encourages a strange denial of oppositional possibility. Perhaps
the time has come to recognize that the majoritarian visions of both
major political parties ends up devaluing human diversity. In their
desperate efforts to claim majorities, differences with parties are
viewed as obstacles to be suppressed in favor of a broader consensus.

This is how vague appeals to populism can really represent an elit­
ism of their own. To achieve their own visions of national identity,
both liberals and conservatives have assaulted-in admittedly differ­
ent ways-multiculturalism or identity politics as divisive. Ignoring
historically entrenched power asymmetries, the big political parties
have argued that “special interests” subvert the potential of a national
accord. Promoted instead is a monolithic definition of citizenship,
which dismisses the specificity of human variety as either irrelevant
or selfish.

The antidemocratic implications of this pseudo populism become
apparent in the way extreme political attitudes become naturalized in
partisan discourses. Take education, for example. Republicans and
Democrats seem incapable of reconciling their political appeal to a
mainstream identity and an educational appeal to uniform “stan­
dards” of achievement. Implicit in recent school reform plans from
both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush-with their programs of uni­
versal testing, their vague suggestions of a uniform curriculum, and

66 A CULTURE DIVIDED

their invitation to business interests to manage public education­
is the belief that the nation has spent too much time pursuing edu­
cational equity and too little time in advancing rarefied standards
of excellence. These attitudes have made many young people feel
powerless, alienated, and even angry.

Enacted by the Bush administration in 2002, federal No Child
Left Behind (NCLB) legislation reauthorized several programs aim­
ing to improve the performance of U.S. primary and secondary
schools by increasing standards of accountability and providing par­
ents more flexibility in choosing schools. NCLB legislation pro­
moted standards-based education reform, formerly known as
“outcome-based” education, predicated on the belief that measurable
goals improve student success in school. NCLB required new tests in
basic skills as a requirement for federal funding. NCLB was contro­
versial for a number of reasons. As historically has been the case with
many national school reform efforts, NCLB was criticized because
the federal government provides such a small proportion of school
funding (which mostly comes from local property taxes). While in
some states more students appeared to pass standardized tests, this
was often proven to have resulted from lower testing standards. Also,
parents were angered by NCLB’s requirement that schools provide
student names and contact information to military recruiters. In
2009, President Barack Obama received criticism for his appoint­
ment of former Chicago Public School Director Arne Duncan as
Secretary of Education. Duncan built a reputation in Chicago for his
aggressive pursuit of standardized testing, surveillance, and police
presence in schools-manifest in the city’s “Renaissance 2010”
school reform plan. Although popular in Chicago business circles for
it’s accountability and businesslike approach to management, Ren­
aissance 2010 was condemned by some educators as old-fashioned
and, ultimately, ineffective in improving student learning and suc­
cess, especially in minority communities.16

All in the Family

Of course, controversies over schooling grow from the public con­
cerns about children. Generally speaking, discussions about children
emerge from the broader discourse on families-a conversation

BELIEF 67

fraught with cultural baggage. Officials running for office recognize
that topics such as childhood, children’s welfare, and the death of
childhood work effectively in emotionalizing political arguments.
The meanings of such terms can be quite variable, ranging from ref­
erences to innocent children that need adult protection, to menacing
children who take weapons to school, to the inner child, the childlike
adult, and the adultlike child. In other words, childhood is not a nat­
ural or fixed category. It is the screen upon which adults project their
social anxieties and desires. The figure of the child has been used his­
torically to promote issues ranging from environmentalism (“chil­
dren inherit the earth”) to tax reform (“mortgaging our children’s
future”). This is why the image of the child often comes attached to
idealized notions of the nuclear family, happy endings, and neatly
resolved stories where handsome princes always win and bad people
look like ugly monsters. At its core, the image of the child is an ideo­
logical construction that gets pitted symbolically against all that
white bourgeois society fears. David Buckingham writes about the
“politics of substitution” that childhood enables. In a climate of
social uncertainty, invoking fears about children provides a powerful
means of commanding public attention and support: campaigns
against homosexuality are redefined as campaigns against pedophiles;
campaigns against pornography become campaigns against child
predators; campaigns against atheism become campaigns against rit­
ualistic child abuse. Those who dare to question the epidemic pro­
portions of such phenomena are themselves labeled-via a politics of
substitution-as hostile to children. 17

When all else fails in many public policy debates, proponents of
just about anything haul out the image of the helpless and vulnerable
child. While it is true that children don’t have the same capabilities
as adults, it also can be said that these projections at times discredit
the intelligence of young people and contribute to a distorted infan­
tilization. Close examination of children’s responses to violent car­
toons, for example, reveals that they more often respond to the
excitement or excess of imagery than to the purposeful brutality of
“retaliatory violence.” When children write their own fairy tales, they
tend to avoid this latter type of violence and write happy endings for
all of the characters.18 Like adults, children do revel in the arousal
and excitement of aggressive representation in what Michael Zucker-

68 A CULTURE DIVIDED

man termed the “sensation seeking” motive. 19 Parents often worry
about children overidentifying with perpetuators of television or
movie violence. Surprisingly, there is very little data on this. What
the research has shown is that most children don’t imagine them­
selves committing violence, although roughly half empathize with
victims of violence.20 Even less plausible is the “forbidden fruit” the­
ory that children’s desires are increased if attempts are made to
restrict access to a program. A variety of studies in the 1970s dis­
proved this widely accepted belief. 21

In many ways, the current discourse on children stands in for the
more politicized discussions of the family, gender roles, and adult
sexuality. The National Organization for Women (NOW) for a time
circulated a bumper sticker that read, “One Nuclear Family Can
Ruin Your Whole Life.” The slogan sums up the view that traditional
family structures-so often equated with a healthy society-have
sometimes worked to limit women’s freedom. Throughout many
parts of the world, societies have or continue to be organized in
patriarchal structures in which men hold primary responsibility and
authority over family and community life. While such traditions
seem long forgotten in the contemporary Western world, it bears his­
torical note that a privilege as fundamental as the right to vote wasn’t
afforded to women until 1920 in the United States, 1944 in France,
1949 in China, and 2006 in the United Arab Emirates.

One needs to examine only current women’s magazines to dis­
cover that entrenched stereotypes of women as the “weaker” or
“fairer” sex” perpetuate themselves in the pages of Cosmopolitan,
Glamour, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, and Wlgue-where
even more disturbingly women are frequently represented as child­
like and girls are often made up to exude adult female sexuality.
Although women legally possess the same rights and theoretical
career options as men, roles of women as homemakers and caregivers
abound in the pages of such publications as Family Circle, Good
Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Martha Stewart Living, Redbook,
and \%mens Day. That these are the magazines most read by women
holds significance as a reminder of latent sexism in American culture.
One notable exception is 0, The Oprah Magazine, the single high­
circulation women’s periodical with a pro feminist, diversity empha­
sis. Television has treated women in more progressive terms, led by

BELIEF 69

The \%mens Television Network, Lifetime, and popular programs like
Brothers and Sisters, Damages, Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, and
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles that feature women in
careers or other roles of autonomy. The one notable throwback is Des­
perate Housewives, representing what has been termed a “postfeminist”
sensibility in which purportedly liberated women voluntarily choose
subordinate and objectified roles.

Simple statistics reflect continuing inequities toward women. Fair
compensation for women in the workplace was written into law in
the 1963 Equal Pay Restoration Act. Yet today women are still paid
23 cents per dollar less than men with equal skills and education.
While women make up 51 percent of the population, only 13 per­
cent of the U.S. Senate and 14 percent of the U.S. House of Repre­
sentatives are women. Approximately 25 percent of doctors and
lawyers are women, although a much smaller percentage of corporate
executive positions are held by women. 22 In global terms, The
United Nations has stated that “progress in bringing women into
leadership and decision-making positions around the world remains
far too slow. “23 The Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Gen­
der Issues, Rachel Mayanja, said, “The past ten years have seen the
fastest growth in the number of women in parliaments, yet even at ‘
this rate, parity between women and men in parliaments will not be
reached until 2040.”24 The term “glass ceiling” is used to describe
barriers based on discrimination. In the United States, the Glass
Ceiling Commission, a government-funded group, stated, “Over half
of all master’s degrees are now awarded to women, yet 95 percent of
senior-level managers of the top Fortune 1000 industrial and 500
service companies are men. Of them, 97 percent are white.”25

With such glaring evidence of a cultural divide along gender lines,
one might expect uniformity in public opinion about the need to
pursue equity. Yet opinion persists in some quarters that women have
strayed too far from their traditional roles. Conservatives argue that
America is threatened by a breakdown of the traditional tamily struc­
ture that, in their view, provides the only satisfactory way of raising
children. Conservatives assert that same-sex or single parent families
produce children more prone to failure. Then there is the Federal
“Defense of Marriage” Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton
in 1996. The act says that the federal government does not recognize

70 A CULTURE DIVIDED

same-sex marriages, but that states can do as they please. In recent
elections, measures to either legitimize or delegitimize same-sex mar­
riage have been put on many state ballots.

Unfounded worries persist about single-parent families. Conser­
vative commentator Ann Coulter writes, “The strongest predictor of
whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a sin­
gle parent.”26 Coulter is fond of quoting Charles Murray, who wrote
that “Illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our
time-more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, wel­
fare, or homelessness because it drives everything else.”27 These are
serious words, considering that today nearly one-third of children
are born to unmarried women. But is growing up in a nontradi­
tional family really harmful? Most social scientists do indeed believe
that family environments strongly influence children’s subsequent
behavior in adult life. But what matters most in the family environ­
ment is the quality of attachment and care-giving. Children subject
to neglect or abuse may be more likely to find themselves in the
criminal justice system as young adults. 28 But even this is not to say
that a “cycle of violence” necessarily results from family life, as was
once theorized. Bad outcomes in adult behavior-including crimi­
nality-are a mix of upbringing, peer relationships, socioeconomic
conditions, education, and circumstance. Any effort to blame a sin­
gle cause must always be examined with scrutiny. Most people
spend more time with their families than in work or school. Hence,
the family historically has remained one of the most potent objects
of political debate–and one of the central issues that can be used to
divide people–even though it is the most widely shared of human
experiences.

Fundamentalism and Secularism

Much had been made in during the past decade of the divide
between fundamentalism and secularism. Christian fundamentalist
camps largely avoided politics through the 1970s, believing that mat­
ters of the spirit were personal concerns. For the most part, funda­
mentalists also liked the separation of church and state that kept
government regulations out of church affairs. The fundamentalist
label is sometimes applied to Christian evangelical practices, which

BELIEF 71

are more accurately described as a branch of fundamentalism.
Fundamentalists-be they Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or any other
religion-try to adhere to the original tenants of a faith, generally
represented in classic texts such as the Bible, Torah, or Koran. Funda­
mentalists often interpret scriptural writings in a literal sense, rather
than viewing them in more modern interpretations as metaphors or
idealistic stories. For example, some Christian fundamentalists teach
that magical events, like instances of faith healing, really do take
place in the present day. In the United States the term “fundamental­
ist” came into use in the early twentieth century after publication of
pamphlets called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (1910-
1915). In part, the fundamentalist movement gained momentum in
response to the growing rise of science and societal changes brought
about through technology. Turn of the century fundamentalists were
especially troubled by the wide acceptance of Charles Darwin’s, Ori­
gin of the Species, which offered an evolutionary account of the devel­
opment of human life.29 Christian fundamentalists still protest the
teaching of Darwin’s ideas in schools, often asserting that children
need exposure to creationist counterarguments.

Fundamentalists often use the term secularism to describe those
perceived as antireligious. The term “secular” originated in England
in the mid-1800s as a means of making a distinction between philo­
sophical and religious ideas. Theorized by agnostic George Holyoake,
secularism promoted a social order separate from religion, without
actively dismissing or criticizing religious belie£ To Holyoake, “Secu­
larism is not an argument against Christianity; it is one independent
of it. It does not question the pretensions of Christianity; it advances
others.”30 As this phrasing suggests, from its earliest appearance, sec­
ularism was seen by many as an assault on religion. More generally,
the term refers to the world of ideas outside religion. For this reason,
secularism often is used in political discussions that address the sepa­
ration of church and state.

More than in most developed nations, religion figures promi­
nently in American life. In the industrial world, the United States has
one of the lowest percentages of people who define themselves as
having no religion: 15 percent.31 More than 75 percent of Ameri­
can’s identify as Christian, two-thirds of whom are Protestants, with
the remaining group primarily identified as Catholic. 32

72 A CULTURE DIVIDED

Half of the Protestant population is known as Evangelical, which
well-known for the belief that people can be “born again.” Protestant
Evangelicals are somewhat more moderate in their beliefs than fun­
damentalists, who subscribe to literal interpretations of Biblical doc­
trine. Christian Fundamentalists appeared in the American political
realm following the 1976 presidencial election of Democrat Jimmy
Carter. Forming what they called a Moral Majority, Christian funda­
mentalists helped sweep Ronald Reagan into office a few years later.
Republicans held the W hite House for twelve years and perceived the
election of Bill Clinton in 1992 as a tragic loss to the forces of secu­
larism. To regain influence over the nation’s politics, religious conser­
vatives decided to focus on state and local politics, organizing a mass
movement known as the Christian Coalition. Conservatives took
control of both houses of Congress in the mid-1990s. Building on
the momentum of those efforts and the scandals of Clinton’s final
years in office, George W. Bush took the White House in 2000 and
held it for eight years, capitalizing in part on public fears that
resulted from the bombing of the World Trade Center and subse­
quent terrorist attacks around the world.

The 9/11 attacks were perpetuated by a small group of Arabic
criminals who espoused beliefs in Islamic fundamentalism. To many
in the United States, the actions of the al-Qaeda terrorists were seen
as emblems of a global Islamic assault on the United States rather
than the actions of an isolated group. But since no national govern­
ment had supported the terrorists, it was difficult for the United
States to target a counterassault-or even a way to track down the
attackers. In an effort to give form to this enemy, George Bush for­
mulated his Axis of Evil and began to search for a reason to attack
one of its member nations. This required a substantial public rela­
tions campaign, which the Bush administration mounted with the
advice of marketing consultants. On the grounds that a new attack
against the United States would soon be launched from Iraq, Amer­
ica invaded that country, to find only that Iraq didn’t have the
weapons of mass destruction it was thought to possess. The political
fullout from this mistake gave Democrats the arguments they needed
to retake Congress and later the presidency.

Regrettably, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and several other inci­
dents have given rise to perceptions of a growing “war” between

BELIEF 73

Islam and the Western world. Though it is widely acknowledged that
9/ I 1 was executed by a very small minority oflslamic extremists, sus­
picions of wider Islamic aggression persist. In recent years, books
have been appearing that support such fears, including Steven Emer­
son’s American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us and Brigitte
Gabriel’s They Must Be Stopped: Why � Must Defeat Radical Mam. 33

Building on the emotionalism following 9/11, such works obscure
the reality that terrorist attacks in United States have been perpetu­
ated by non-Islamics in places like Oklahoma City and Columbine
High School.

Many Americans don’t know that Islam is the second largest faith
in the world after Christianity. Now a religion of 1.8 billion people,
Islam is practiced by people known as Muslims, a word that means
“One who submits to God.” Muslims believe that God-also called
Allah-was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, the same God that
Christians and Jews believe spoke to Abraham. Most of the world’s
Muslims live in the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Southeast
Asia. There are several branches oflslam, the two largest of which are
Sun.ni and Shi’a, who differ in their interpretation of Muhammad’s
teac hings. Contrary to some perceptions in the United States and
elsewhere, Islam does not promote aggression or intolerance. In fact,
the Muslim scripture known as the Koran (or Quran) states that
“Those who believe (in the Quran), and those who follow the Jewish
(scriptures), and the Christians … and (all) who believe in God and
the last day and work righteousness, shall have their reward with
their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.”34

The growing awareness of the Islamic world among people in the
United States also has brought attention to the American Jewish
population. At between 5 and 6 million people, America’s Jewish
population is roughly equivalent to that of Israel. Together the two
nations are home to 80 percent of world’s Jews. Sephardic Jews from
Spain and Portugal began immigrating to the United States in the
early 1800s, with a dramatic increase in the latter part of the cen­
tury of Ashkenazi Jews from Germany and the Eastern European
nations of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania. Initially settling primarily
in the eastern United States, Jewish communities quickly developed
their own support networks, which were reinvigorated following the
Nazi Holocaust of World War II. The influence ofJews in American

74 A CULTURE DIVIDED

business and academia has far exceeded their 2.5 percent share of the
U.S. population, as has their influence on politics. Jewish Americans
account for 37 percent of U.S. recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize, 8
percent of the board seats of U.S. corporations, and 13 percent of the
U.S. Senate. The role of Jews in U.S. leadership positions partially
explains America’s longstanding commitment to Israel, along with
Israel’s position as a bulwark of U.S. interests in the Middle East. As
the United States has improved its diplomatic relationships with the
region’s oil-producing nations, most notably Saudi Arabia, Arab­
Israeli tensions within the U.S. population have become another
aspect of America’s divided culture.

Authoritarianism and Consumerism

As America grapples with its real and imagined enemies, the nation
also struggles with the erosion of the very principles it seeks to pro­
tect. Part of what is dividing U.S. culture is a weakening of demo­
cracy. As America strives to regain its role as an example for the world
to follow, its own people are succumbing to apathy and indiffer­
ence-even as they search for renewed purpose and “change.” The
most damaging impediments to American democracy can be sum­
marized in two categories: authoritarianism and consumerism.

Authoritarianism is the process often associated with modernism,
structuralism, and functionalism, which imposes bureaucratic regula­
tion, surveillance, and control upon human activity. In this scheme,
people submit to larger structures in the presumed interest of the
social good. During the Bush years, authoritarianism got an historic
boost with 9/11, which was used to spread fear and compliance
throughout the nation. Suppressed in the process was any sense of
autonomy or permission to challenge the prevailing order. Beyond
being told that they cannot question the interest of national security,
citizens are implicitly told that they should not rock the boat, cause
trouble, or upset the system. This thinking suggests that disagree­
ment is a function of individual anomaly, maladjustment, inade­
quacy, or lack of will. Authoritarianism can be described as the
process through which people come to be seen as passive and easily
manipulated objects, rather than active and autonomous subjects.
Authoritarianism perpetuates a fatalism that tells people they can do

BELi EF 75

little to alter the course of history or their own lives. This passive ide­
ology infuses mass media. Movies, television, magazines, and news­
papers suggest that the production of ideas and images is something
that is always done by someone else. This message also is reinforced
in the socializing processes of education that teaches children-later
to become citizens-about hierarchies of knowledge, expertise, and
superv1s1on.

Consumerism tells people that acquisition and consumption are
the road to personal satisfaction, while it simultaneously promotes
hierarchies of wealth and power. Clearly, consumerism frustrates
community by encouraging competitive acquisition. Debilitating fic­
tions of “making it” and “the good life” are defined in terms of soli­
tary consumption rather than civic concern. In the late 1990s,
former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put it this way:
‘There is no such thing as society, only individual men and women
and their families.”35 The first strategy for getting out of the con­
sumerist trap lies in pointing out the things that people actually
value most-friends, family, and home-cannot be bought with
money. Next, on a broader social level, one can raise the question of
how well off the average citizen is and examine the circumstances of
those who have suffered the consequences of economic failure. Given
the glaring lack of equality in the United States, one can’t help asking
why more people aren’t clamoring for radical change. Maybe it has
to do with the perception that the task is so overwhelming. Or per­
haps it results from the lack of a meaningful program from either
political party. At the very least, critical intellectuals can encourage
the growing rage of all citizens silenced by the ideals of consumerist
paradise. W ith each passing year, the distance between the dream
and the reality widens. The reckoning that is coming holds both pos­
sibilities and potential difficulties for real social change.

Is any real progress on the horizon? The grip of authoritarianism
and consumerism on the American people seems to be weakening.
As the government in Washington has been handed back and forth
in recent decades between the Republicans and the Democrats,
there appears to be a growing desire for meaningful social transfor­
mation. For this reason, it is more important than ever for people
committed to change to seize the initiative rather than wait for oth­
ers to act. This is the challenge of the Obama era. Well before the

76 A CULTURE DIVIDED

Obama administration, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe pre­
sciently argued, “If the demands of a subordinated group are pre­
sented purely as negative demands subversive of a certain order,
without being linked to any viable project for the reconstruction of
specific areas of society, their capacity to act hegemonically will be
excluded from the outset.”36 Framed in this manner, the solipsistic
nihilism that had so dominated progressive politics in the early
2000s was both defensive and counterproductive. We need a posi­
tive plan.

This new initiative must combine a politics and an ethics of a sort
not typically drawn upon by activists. These entail types of practice
that both eschew easy answers and ambivalent relativism. The seem­
ingly paradoxical recipe needed will respect differences, oppose
oppressions, and permit the contingencies of provisional spaces of
experiment with new social forms. Given such a challenge, it is
incumbent upon future change agents to reassert their roles in civic
life. This calls for activists to assume new social roles and to pursue
new forums for civic dialogue. 37 As politics in the 2000s has shown,
new public spaces like the Internet have remarkable potential for
invigorating political life, especially among the young and previously
disenfranchised. This kind of change entails promoting notions of
shared responsibility for community life along with the belief that
change is indeed possible. This is a profoundly cultural endeavor in
that it is an act of political education. Such a cultural program con­
vinces people that individual acts of citizenship (such as voting) can
make a difference-that people themselves can command the
authority to make community decisions.

At the heart of the struggle must stand a set of competencies
through which cultural activists can dismantle structures that exclude
people from political life and that tell people their voices are unim­
portant. At the same time, it is necessary to connect a pair of con­
cepts that authoritarian consciousness always has found itself unable
to reconcile: difference and egalitarianism. In the bankrupt authori­
tarian view, differing needs or interests are to be overcome or sup­
pressed in the interests of equality. Implicit in this view is a hierarchy
of opinion supporting an idealized “national” identity. While this
idealized appeal to the common good can encourage citizens to look
beyond their narrow self-interests, it also asks them to give up some-

BELIEF 77

thing of themselves. A genuine democracy does not make these kinds
of demands but strikes a balance between differing interests and egal­
itarian society

Consumerism and authoritarianism work against this delicate bal­
ancing. For this reason, critically minded citizens need to keep
democratic values at the forefront of American public debate-not
the authoritarian democracy of unproblematic civic verisimilitude
and flag-waving patriotism, not the consumerist democracy in which
people are free to spend themselves into a happy life-a democracy
defined by continual struggle, change, and critical revision. This is
not to suggest a return to nostalgic origins but to propose a demo­
cratic imaginary perhaps yet unachieved in American history. The
task has political and ethical dimensions. In political terms, the com­
mon shortcoming of all prevailing governments (including utopian
ones) is their applications of a single set of standards for everyone.
This problem becomes particularly evident within conventional lib­
eralism. Although frequently presented as a pathway to emancipa­
tion, mainstream liberalism nevertheless perpetuates d istinctions
between historical subjects and objects: those who act and those who
are acted upon. It seeks to make surface corrections to a structurally
flawed system without interrogating its underlying inequities.
Regrettably, this is the pitfull of much high-minded intellectualism
and academic theory, which commits the additional sin of claiming
vanguard wisdom only for its own members. Such condescending
logic has also been attributed to the prescriptive exhortations of
“empowerment” associated with social concern.

In contrast, a genuine democracy-what Laclau and Mouffe term
a “radical democracy”–defines itself on all levels in pluralistic terms.
There is no single set of attitudes or social group to which all others
must conform because an acknowledgment is made of the impossi­
bility of any one perspective that satisfies diverse needs. Instead, the
unifying ethos is one of decentered authority. Owing to this latter
principle, such a political program resists the vacuous amoralities of
relativism and unexamined pluralism. For obvious reasons, such a
scheme seems dangerously unstable to many conservatives who warn
of the “threat” of uncontained difference. This is where the ethical
dimension of radical democracy comes in. What is necessary is a way
to integrate public and private realms without succumbing to a

156 NOTES

the Crossroads in the Information Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Lit­
tlefield, 2001); David Trend, Reading Digital Culture (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2001); David Trend, The Myth of Media Violence (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2007); David Trend, Everyday Culture: Finding and
M aking Meaning in a Changing World (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2007).

19. Georg W ilhelm Frederich Hegel, P henomenology of the Spirit,
trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).

Chapter 3
1. George W. Bush, “V ictory Speech,” delivered at Yale Universiry,

December 20, 2000, http://everything2.com (accessed February 24,
2009).

2. Ronald Reagan, “Evil Empire Speech,” March 8, 1983, http://www
.teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=961 (accessed
May 15, 2008).

3. Holy Bible, King James Version, “Book of Genesis,” vol. 5, ch. 3
(Philadelphia, PA: National, 1978).

4. George Lakoff, Whose Freedom? The Battle over Americas Most
Important Idea (New York: Picador, 2006), 12.

5. Ibid.
6. Jack Zipes, Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of Children s

Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (New York: Routledge,
2001), 42.

7. Rene Descartes, as quoted in David E. Cooper, World Philosophies:
An Historicallntroduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 253.

8. Joshua Alston, “Too Much of a Bad T hing,” Newsweek (January
12, 2009), http://www.newsweek.com (accessed February 2, 2009).

9. Protagoras, “Moral Relativism,” http://www.wikipedia.org
(accessed May 10, 2008).

10. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles ofNarnia (New York: HarperCollins,
2006).

11. C. S. Lewis, quoted in Armond M. Nicholi and T heodore Dal­
rymple, “C. S. Lewis vs. Sigmund Freud on Good and Evil,” American
Enterprise, http://www.taemag.com (accessed May 11, 2008).

12. Molly Ivins, untitled address, National Public Radio, June 22,
1995.

13. W illiam E. Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke Universiry
Press, 2005).

NOTES 157

14. Ibid., 42.
15. Chantal Mouffe, “Democratic Politics Today,” in Dimensions of

Radical Democracy, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1991).
16. Henry A. Giroux and Kenneth Saltzman, “Obama’s Betrayal of

Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of School­
ing,” http://www.truthout.org (accessed January 30, 2009).

17. David Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in
the Age of Electronic Media (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 11.

18. Ibid., 72.
19. Michael Zuckerman, Sensation Seeking: Beyond the Optimal Level

of Arousal (New York: W iley, 1979).
20. Ibid., 99.
21. “Women’s Gains in Politics Not Seen in Board Rooms, CEO

Offices,” November 17, 2008, http://www.news.ucdavis.edu (accessed
February 8, 2009).

22. U N Division for the Advancement of Women, “Women Still
Struggle to Break through Glass Ceiling in Government, Business, and
Academia,” March 8, 2006, http://.www.un.org (accessed February 2,
2009).

23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ann Coulter, Guilty: Liberal Victims and Their Assault on America

(New York: Crown Forum, 2008), 37.
26. Charles Murray, cited in Coulter, Guilty, 37.
27. S. E. Holmes Jr. and J. Kashani Slaughter, “Risk Factors in Child­

hood That Lead to the Development of Conduct Disorder and Antiso­
cial Personaliry Disorder,” Child Psychiatry and Human Development 31
(2001): 183-193.

28. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle far Life
(New York: BiblioBazaar, 2007 [1859]).

29. “Secularism,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularism (accessed
May 15, 2008).

30. “American Religious Identification Survey,” Ciry Universiry of
New York, 2001, http://www.gc.cuny.edu (accessed February 10, 2009).

31. Ibid. Other religious denominations in the United States are
Mormon (1.6 percent), Muslim (0.6 percent), Buddhist (0.5 percent),
and Hindu (0.4 percent).

158 NOTES

32. Steven Emerson, American jihad: The Ter rorists Living among Us
(New York: Free Press, 2002); Brigitte Gabriel, They Must Be Stopped·
Why m Must Defeat Radical Islam (New York: St Martin’s, 2008).

33. “The Cow,” in Qur’an, 2:62.
34. Margaret T hatcher, “AIDS Education and the Year 2000,” speech

delivered October 31, 1987, http://www.margarettharcher.org (accessed
February 27, 2009).

35. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore
and Paul Cammack (London: Verso, 1985), 189.

36. See Jilrgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol.
1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy
(Boston: Beacon, 1984).

37. See John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmil­
lan, 1910), 321-360.

Chapter4
1. U.S. Census Bureau, The American and Alaska Native Population:

2000 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2001).
2. Emme Lazarus, “T he New Colossus,” http://www.libertys­

tatepark.com/emma.htm (accessed February 24, 2009).
3. Roy Beck and Steven A. Camarots, “Elite vs. Public Opinion: An

Examination of Divergent Views on Immigration,” Center for Immigra­
tion Studies, 2002, http://www.cis.org/articles/2002/backl 402.html
(accessed June 19, 2008).

4. “Public Opinion Polls on Immigration,” Time (January 2006),
http://www.fairus.org (accessed June 19, 2008).

5. Deborah White, “Pros and Cons of the Immigration Reform Act
of 2007,” http:1/about.com (accessed June 18, 2008).

6. Sam Roberts, “Government Offers Look at Nation’s Immigrants,”
New York Times, February 21, 2009.

7. Congressional Budget Office, Immigration in the United States
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Offcie, 2006).

8. “Myths and Facts about Youth Crime,” Center on Juvenile Crimi­
nal Justice, 2000, http:l/www.cjcj.org/jjic/myths_facts.php (accessed
June 25, 2008).

9. Slavoj Zizek, mlcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso,
2002), 19.

NOTES 159

10. H. Aaron Cohl, Are™- Scaring Ourselves to Death? (New York: St
Martins, 1997), 9.

11. Claudine Chamberlain, “Fear of Fear Itself,” June 22, 2003,
http://abcnews.com (accessed January 3, 2009), 2.

12. Ibid., 1.
13. Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of

the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
14. Chamberlain, “Fear of Fear Itself,” 2.
15. Ibid.

16. Mike Males, F raming Youth: IO Myths about the Next Generation
(Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1998), 29.

17. David L. Altheide, Creating Fear: News and the Construction of
Crisis (New York: de Gruyter, 2002), 19.

18. Ibid.
19. Frederick John Desroches, Force and Fear: Robbery in Canada

(Toronto: Canadian Scholars, 2002).
20. Glassner, The Culture of Fear.
21. Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination

of Disaster (New York: Metropolis, 1998).
22. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (London: Wild er,

2008).
23. David Gardi ner, The Science of Fear (New York: Dutton,

2008).
24. Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano, Stop Teaching Our Kids

to Kill: A Call to Action against Tv, Movie, and Video Game Violence
(New York: Crown, 1999), 1.

25. Glassner, The Culture of Fear, xxi.
26. Ibid.
27. Lewis Beale, “Picturing the Worst Happening,” New York Times,

July 7, 2002, sec. 2, 1, 9.
28. C. S. Green and D. Bavelier, “Action Video Game Modifies

Visual Selective Attention,” Nature 423 (2003): 534-537.
29. Eric Chudler, “Video Games May Improve Visual Skills,”

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/videog.html. (accessed June 19,
2003).

30. Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace; or How an Evil Clown, a
Haitian Trixter Spirit, Two W izards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a
Database into a Society,” Village Voice (December 21, 1993): 36.

–�- – —

EVERYDAY CULTURE

FINDING AND MAKING MEANING

IN A CHANGING WORLD

DAVID TREND

Paradigm Publishers

Boulder • London

52 CHAPTER .Two

out artists for their abilities to “think outside the box” and work in quicldy

formed teams and collaborative groups. Artworks portray historical eras,

events, and values. Art records the accomplishments of groups as well as

the fates that have befallen them. Art keeps alive the specificity of human

difference and past tradition.

45. Paul W illis, Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Ev­

eryday Cultures of the Young (Boulder and San Francisco: Westview Press,

1992), 1.

46. Ibid., 18.

47. Ibid., 1.

48. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.

49. Ibid., xii.

50. Juliet B. Schor, Born To Buy (New York: Scribner, 2004).

51. Ibid., 9.

52. Ibid.

53. Juliet B. Schor, “Towards a New Politics of Consumption,” in

The Consumer Society Reader, eds. Juliet B. Schor and Douglas B. Holt

(New York: The New Press, 2000), 459.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid.

56. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,”

in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review

Press, 1971).

57. Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Critical Essays (New York: Con­

tinuum, 1982).

58. David Gauntlett, Media, Gender, and Identity: An Introduction

(New York: Routledge, 2002), 195.

59. Ibid., 39.

60. Juliet B. Schor, “The New Politics of Consumption: Why

Americans Want So Much More Than They Need,” in The Boston Review

(Summer 1999).

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid., 15.

CHAPTER THREE

READING

LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION, AND NEW MEDIA

Reading takes place everywhere in all kinds of unexpected ways.
Any discussion of everyday culture requires a discussion of the ways
that ordinary people interpret the movies and TV they watch, the

radio and music they listen to, the toys and games they play. In the

broadest sense it can be said that people “read” the media in quite
diverse ways, bringing to the interpretative encounter their various

educational histories, cultural backgrounds, and levels of literacy,

as well as their tastes, biases, and opinions. Forms of culture play
out differently in different cultural activities-shopping, going to

school, traveling, work, and leisure-as well as in different media.

To a certain extent everyone possesses a degree of critical skill.
It’s often said that the TV generation has a level of media literacy

superior to the print generations that preceded it. Today’s digital,
generation is more media literate than its predecessors who grew
up without computers or the Internet.

No one needs reminding that media-photography, video, film,
the Internet, and interactive computer games-plays an enormous

role in our lives. The U.S. Department ofLabor estimates that the
average adult spends four hours every day watching TV, two hours

53

54 CHAPTER THREE

listening to the radio, thirty minutes online, and thirty minutes

reading.1 Regardless of one’s viewing habits or the time one spends

at any one media activity, it’s hard to deny the importance of me­

dia culture in shaping our understandings of who we are and how

we got here. So accustomed have we become to using media for

learning about those around us, our communities, national, and

international events, that most of us, long ago, came to rely on

the media and generally trust its ability to inform.

This section begins with an essay called, “Literacies and Media

Literacy,” examining the role of language and the functions of

speaking, reading, and writing in communication. The concept

of literacy is expanded in discussions about the variety of ways

messages are sent and received in an era of media and computer

communications. The next essay, “Violence in the Media,” applies

principles of media literacy to the topic of representational violence.

It outlines several ways to think about this highly contested public

issue. The final essay, “Technology and the Everyday,” reviews both

utopian and dy stopian perspectives on new media technologies.

Literacies and Media Literacy

When most people hear the term “literacy,” the first idea that

comes to mind is written proficiency. A literate person is one who

knows how to read and write . In the contemporary world, literacy

is considered to be a prerequisite for success in school, careers, and

everyday life. Students who do not learn to read and write prop­

erly are compr�mised in their ability to function fully in society.

If a person cannot read, it is difficult to fill out a job application,

get a driver’s license, or access important news and information

that may only be available in printed materials. Literacy also plays

READING 55

a crucial role in the maintenance of a healthy democracy. To par­
ticipate in collective decisionmaking, citizens need to be able to
access information, “read” the world around them, and respond
in appropriate ways. Contrary to what many people think, literacy
is a pertinent issue throughout the world and is not just a chal­
lenge faced in underdeveloped countries or inner cities. Literacy
challenges exist in every neighborhood, every church group, every
school, and every work environment. It’s important to recognize
that definitions of literacy vary. Also, literacy is relative to the nation
or place in which it is measured. When the National Institute for
Literacy speaks of literacy in the United States, it specifies “literacy”
in English because it recognizes that non-English speakers may
be perfectly functioning members of society. There is no single
definition of literacy. In fact, the term “literacy” now extends far
beyond mere spoken or written language. As Elizabeth Thoman
and Tessa Jolls explain:

Today, information about the world around us comes to us not
only by words on a piece of paper but more and more through
the powerful images and sounds of our multimedia culture.
From the clock radio that wakes us up in the morning until we
fall asleep watching the late night talk show, we are exposed to
hundreds-·even thousands–of images and ideas not only from
television but also from websites, movies, talk radio; magazine
covers, e-mail, video games, music, cell phone messages, bill­
boards-and more. Media no longer just shape our culture …
they are our culture.2

Although most people take for granted their abilities to decipher the
meanings of photographs, television programs, movies, and other
media, numerous complex audio/visual “languages” are used,
each having specific rules and grammar. Thoman and Jolls assert,

56 CHAPTER THREE

“If our children are to be able to navigate their lives through this

multimedia culture, they need to be fluent in ‘reading’ and ‘writing’

the language of images and sounds” just as they have learned to

“read” and “write” the language of printed communications.
3

In discussing media literacy, psychologist Howard Gardner

explains that people possess not just one form of intelligence but

what he terms “multiple intelligences.” Gardner contends that

“literacies, skills, and disciplines ought to be pursued as tools that

allow us to enhance our understanding of important questions,

topics, and themes.”4 Today’s readers become literate by learning

to read the words and symbols in today’s world. Readers analyze,

compare, evaluate, and interpret multiple representations from a

variety of media formats, including spoken language; texts, pho­

tographs, moving pictures, and interactive media.

On a basic level, media literacy has evolved to help people

understand the different ways that information is organized and

presented in these audio/visual formats. Although everyone pos­

sesses a fundamental ability to understand a lecture, a photograph,

or a television commercial-clearly we are in an era in which further

education can help one grapple with the sensory overload that the

more complicated forms of media utilize. Consider the ways these

different forms of media deliver content.

Speaking is a linear, time-based form of expression. Words and sen­

tences are uttered in a sequence that accumulates meaning as

the speaker continues to tall<:. In classical Western philosophy,

spoken language was said to operate through the principles of

rhetoric and grammar. In ancient and medieval times, rhetoric

( from the Greek word rhetor for orator or teacher) was the art

or technique of persuasion through the use of oral language.
5

As such, rhetoric was said to flourish in open and democratic

societies with rights of free speech, free assembly, and political

READING 57

enfranchisement for some portion of the population. In con­
junction with rhetoric, grammar concerned itself with correct,
accurate, pleasing, and effective language use through the study
and criticism of literary models. Keeping track of rhetoric and
grammar requires considerable concentration, since what is
being said typically is not repeated. Listeners must follow the
spoken sequence of ideas and construct the story or argument
in their own minds. One advantage of conventional face-to­
face spoken communication lies in its ability to convey added
nuance and meaning through the intonation, facial expressions,
pacing, and body language of the speaker (ethos). Also, listen­
ing makes demands on one’s time. A person can read a book
anywhere and anytime. But conversations or lectures are often
fixed in time and space.

In today’s digital world, much communication takes place
by electronic means. People don’t spend as much time as they
once did sharing the same physical space for an exchange of
ideas. In the 1800s, audiences would sit for prolonged periods
to hear oratorical exchanges. Neil Postman writes that the
famous presidential debate between Stephen A. Douglas and
AbrahamLincoln onAugust21, 1858,lasted seven hours, with
each spealcer debating and then responding for ninety minutes
at a time.6 Listeners can exert control over the speed of the
communication only ifin conversation with the speaker-or in
a situation like a class or meeting, which would permit feedback
during the discussion. Such instances afford participants in a
dialogue to make observations, pose questions, or otherwise
interact to change the course of the spoken narrative. Listen­
ers must maintain attention to the spealcer and make efforts
to screen out extraneous sounds or goings on. The telephone
facilitates this process in common usage by limiting commu­
nication to two conversants. Anyone who has ever joined a

58 CHAPTER THREE

conference call will attest to the complexities of keeping track

of the multiple voices, which have been stripped of their visual

and spatial referents. People on conference calls need to tell

others when they arrive or arc leaving and continually need to

remind each other who they are.

Written language also works in a linear sequence, but not with the

same spontaneity of speaking: Because the narrative is printed

on a page, readers have the ability to determine the pace of

reading. At the same time, readers need to remain relatively

immobile, concentrated on the text, and undistracted by extra­

neous design elements, typographic flourishes, or illustrations.

In this sense, readers can exert a degree of control over the

sequence of ideas they are given. Readers can pause, reread,

skip ahead, or talce breaks in their reading. But because the

narrative is silently appearing on a page, readers have little

opportunity to interact or respond to the writer or to gain

the type of additional cues that speaking can express. Also

unlike spealcing, written texts can be shared with others or

reengaged at other times. Indeed, the physicality of a printed

text is one of its great advantages over spoken language. But

this same physicality also tethers messages to the materiality

of printed matter.

It took the introduction of the telegraph in the mid-1800s

to mobilize the world of print by changing the speed by which

information traveled. Prior to the telegraph, information could

only move as fast as a ship or train could travel. With the

telegraph, the huge time lapses that could fall between news

and its reception at a distant location were eliminated. But the

context from which news emerged was often lost in the process.

As the speed of messages increasingly surpassed the ability of

people to travel with them, telegraphed information began to

READING 59
I

take on a life of its own. Some historians of communication
assert that this dematerialization of information ushered in a
new age of deception and confusion-while at the same time
allowing disembodied information to become commodified
in new ways. Messages disconnected from any physical trace
of their origin could be decontextualized and manipulated
as never before.7 A person on the West Coast could com­
municate via telegraph with a person on the East Coast, but
not necessarily with any depth or background knowledge. As
Postman writes, “The telegraph may have made the country
into ‘one neighborhood,’ but it was a peculiar one, populated
by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts
about each other. “8

Sound recordings offer many of the benefits of written texts in the
ways they allow readers/listeners options for reviewing or
altering the pace of listening. Recorded information offers
obvious benefits to the unsighted or to those without reading
ability. Recorded texts also convey additional levels of meaning
that come from inflection, intonation, multiple voices, and
added elements like music or sound effects. But recordings
require equipment that written texts do not. The benefit of
sound equipment lies in its ability both to play and record
information-and by extension makes the recordings avail­
able by duplication, amplification, or transmission to multiple
listeners or remote audiences in much the same way printing
functions for written texts. Recorded music is consumed by
individuals, broadcast via radio or the Internet, compiled
into collections, and in the digital age is shared among users,
sampled, manipulated, and reused in new, creative contexts.
Sound recordings do this in part by isolating a moment and
then removing it from what falls outside the recording. This

60 CHAPTER THREE

erases the surrounding information from which the recording

was derived. Context disappears. At the same time, recordings

exploit the viewer’s trust in mechanically produced realism.

Even though people know that sound recordings can distort

reality or create alternative realities via analog or digital en­

hancement, people retain a belief in their verisimilitude even

if it is a tentative belief. There is no other choice.

Photography delivers meaning in a nonsequential fashion, with the

entire image available at once. With a photograph, a viewer

has the ability to navigate the image, choosing where to look

and what elements to scrutinize. For this reason, the meanings

that photographs convey are less stable than sound recordings

or written texts. What a photograph “says” to a viewer is in

part dependent on how the viewer chooses to “read” the im­

age. Photographic meaning also emerges from such elements

of visual language as composition, shape, tone, color, point

of view, image size, and crnpping-all of which are operating

simultaneously. These formal elements are but the beginning

of the story, however. The content of the image, juxtaposition

of subject matter, and the various interpretations that pictorial

elements evoke work together to make photography an ex­

tremely dynamic medium. Complicating matters further are the

accumulated meanings that come when several photographs

are seen together on a page, or in sequence, or when captions

or other texts accompany the images. The multiplicity of these

factors explains why people often derive different meanings

from photographs or at times can’t explain why a photograph

is saying what it is saying. Some communications’ experts as­

sert that the complexities of photographic language enable it

to manipulate viewers, as happens in advertising, propaganda,

and entertainment contexts.

READING 61

Motion pictures combine the elements of movement sequence’ ‘
sound, and special effects with the delivery of photographic
meaning. Individual shots are animated by action taking place
within them, but further motion can be added with camera
zooms, pans, and tracking techniques. These cinematic forms
of movement geometrically extend the complexity of meaning
beyond that of a still photograph. The sequencing of shots
into a filmic montage adds another dimension. Dialogue,
voiceovers, music, and sound effects contribute added layers
of meaning. Conventional special effects and the plethora of
contemporary digital enhancements, animation footage, and
computer-generated imagery complicate interpretation still
further. But like photographs, moving pictures construct a
world of decontextualized fragments. Film and video clips exist
without a connection to the world from which they were taken.
They can be used for any purpose to say anything. As such,
pieces of moving imagery have no certain history, veracity, or
ethics. They are simply fragments of material.

Interactive media use computers or networks to enable the user
to initiate communication or respond to it. It is often argued
that interactive technologies are more potent than “passively”
received media such as television and radio because users
must actively participate in the experience of searching a text,
playing a game, or writing an e-mail message. The nature of
this interaction becomes exceedingly complex if audio/visual
information and text are negotiated simultaneously with hand
controls and steering mechanisms, and accompanied by the
perception of rapid movement through space. The interac­
tive character of computer networks has enabled the creation
of online communities and new “spaces” of engagement for
purposes ranging from game playing to academic research.

62 CHAPTER THREE

The two-directional information flow of interactive multimedia
also has enabled industry and government to monitor online
activity and collect information about users.

As even this brief review of media forms and technologies
suggests, the various “languages” embedded in everyday com­
munication, entertainment, and news media are considerably more
complicated than many people perceive. Yet most of us take our
fundamental “literacy” in these technologies for granted. Should
we be concerned about media with such powerful abilities to ma­
nipulate information or influence opinion? Postman has argued that
as we have evolved from a society based on the spoken or printed
word to one based on photography, sound recordings, and moving
pictures, we have gradually lost the ability to discern the veracity
of what we are interpreting. Postman states, “Since intelligence is
primarily defined as one’s capacity to grasp the truth of things, it
follows that what a culture means by intelligence is derived from
the character ofits important forms of communication. “9 Postman
goes on to explain, “As a culture moves from orality to writing to
printing to television, its ideas of truth move with it.”10

With spoken and typographic media, many people feel more
confident about their abilities to discern the truth of statements
because they can examine messages in a controlled, word-by-word
manner. Clear rules of syntax in oral and written communication
have the effect of stabilizing meaning. But a photograph “lacks
a syntax,” according to Postman, “which deprived it of a capac­
ity to argue with the world.”11 He claims that “As an ‘objective’
slice of space-time, the photograph testified that someone was
there or something happened. Its testimony is powerful but of­
fers no opinions-no ‘should-have-beens’ or ‘might-have-beens.’
Photography is preeminently a world of fact, not of dispute about
facts or of conclusions to be drawn from them. “12 Making matters

READING 63

worse, photographs dislocate meaning in both time and space.
Susan Sontag wrote about this ability of a photographic image
to alter the interpretation of a scene, stating that the borders of
a photograph “seem arbitrary. Anything can be separate, made
discontinuous, from anything else: All that is necessary is to frame
the subject differently.”13

Cautionary voices like Postman’s and Sontag’s urge consider­
ation of media and digital education in public policy de bates, school
curriculum discussions, and the programming of public service
media. These advocates assert that in today’s world a media/digital
literate citizenry is a necessity for a healthy democracy. This type of
literacy education begins with an analysis of how images on TV or
on the Web are built in formal terms. It then moves to discussion
of the producers, intentions, contexts, and economic issues behind
visual material. These powerful concepts of electronic literacy can
be used to enhance people’s critical thinking skills about the mass
media to help them look at television and interactive media in new
ways, and to clarify the role that consumers play in the economics
of media.

The Evolution of the Media Literacy Field

Television became a part of education in the United States during
the decade following the Second World War, but critical viewing
was the last thing from the minds ofits early proponents. As the first
wave of the baby boom hit the classroom in the 1950s, video was
recognized as a means ofincreasing teacher productivity. By simply
eliminating the need for duplicate presentations, video was credited
with reductions in teaching labor of up to seventy percent. 14 Video
was also recognized as a powerful tool for observation and evalua­
tion.15 Concurrent advances in computer and telecommunications

88 CHAPTER THREE

Technologies and the Everyday

Any discussion of everyday life needs to contain a consideration
of”digital culture” and the technological values it promotes. Pick
up any newspaper or magazine, or turn on a television, and you
will see endless advertisements and news items· suggesting that
the latest digital phone, palm computer, minidisk player, or chip­
implanted credit card will yield increased productivity, enlivened
leisure time, and enhanced communication-not to mention social
harmony, economic stability, and democracy. 51 U nlil<.e prior utopias brought about by philosophical reflection, social amelioration, or proletarian revolt, this version of the future emerges as a product of a different sort. With the purchase of the appropriate products and services, a perfected existence will come from a multinational corporation.

This vision isn’t so new, really. Throughout history, business
interests have cloaked their agendas in a rhetoric of social better­
ment. General Electric’s familiar “better living through technol­
ogy” mantra of the 1950s was really just another way of focusing
consumer attention on the added convenience of electric frying
pans, blenders, and dishwashers-and away from the specters of
industrial pollution, nuclear annihilation, and the forces of a preda­
tory market capitalism. Indeed the purpose of advertising has always
been to sell the idealized images that lie behind commodities, rather
than merely the products themselves. In our hypersaturated media
environment, the relationship of representations to their referents
becomes reversed. Commercial images do not represent products
as much as products represent images. 52

So what is new about the utopia offered by cyberculture, i f
anything? In part, the answer lies i n the extent that this utopia end­
lessly is hyped and promoted. But in another sense, digital media
present novel and not entirely understood modes of experience

READING 89

that extend subjectivity, social relations, and political power into
increasingly ephemeral and elusive dimensions. As people spend
more and more time with their telephones, televisions, and com­
puters, the physicality of experience diminishes. This has specific
consequences for the world of commerce, where the production
and sale of goods and services increasingly moves from the mate­
rial to the immaterial. Concepts and images-termed “intellectual
capital”-now dominate a marketplace previously devoted to the
exchange of objects. In this environment, new currencies emerge
relating to speed, access, and privacy. How fast a connection can one
afford? How much hardware is needed? Where, when, and at what
price can one access information? At how many points are one’s
movements and choices observed, recorded, analyzed, and sold?

Current controversies over the role of digital media in con­
temporary life have their roots in unresolved contradictions in the
history of technology itself. As an area of study, technology largely
was ignored through much of Western history. In the aristocratic
culture of ancient Greece, the most revered forms of thinking
addressed social, political, and theoretical concerns rather than
what were considered the everyday banalities o.f technology. 53. Not
unlike contemporary attitudes toward “technical schools” and

“technicians,” the idea of technology carried a crudely instrumental
connotation. The conceptualization of “technology” in today’s
inclusive and comprehensive understanding of the term did not
gain popular currency until after World War I. As the Western
enlightenment was unfolding in the l 700s, technical ideas were
considered endeavors in what were termed the “mechanical arts”
(material, practical, industrial), as opposed to the “fine arts” (ideal,
creative, intellectual). As Leo Marx writes, “The habit of separating
the practical and the fine arts served to ratify a set of overlapping
invidious distinctions between things and ideas, the physical and
the mental, the mundane and the ideal female and male, mal<.ing

90 CHAPTER THREE

and thinking, the work of enslaved and free men. ”
54 This is not

to suggest a negative view of technology-simply a resolutely

practical one.
With the development of the biological and social sciences in

the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, technology came to be

viewed as a natural manifestation of the human will to grow and

prosper. This idea of technology a:s an organic and unremittingly

positive “extension of man” provided the basis for what has been

termed “technological instrumentalism.” Within this commonsense

framework, technology is viewed as a neutral tool that serves as an

agent of social progress. Technological instrumentalism flourished

in the nineteenth century with the development of such devices as

the steam engine, locomotive, water mill, cotton gin, power loom,

telegraph, and numerous other inventions that enhanced human

capacity and industrial productivity. Ruminating over these inno­

vations in his famous “Sign of the Times” essay of 1829, Thomas

Carlisle termed the coming era the “Age of Machinery. ”
55 But the

technological revolution had other consequences as well. With the

broad-based mechanization of the workplace, the character of labor

began to change, as goods once made by hand were produced on

the assembly line. Over time, the culture of the everyday became

controlled. As shoemakers, blacksmiths, and similar craftspeople

were displaced by workers who operated machinery and punched

a time clock, trades of many types became drained of their “artis­

tic” elements. Attitudes toward work and leisure began to shift as

a result. To a large extent, creative activity ceased to be a part of

one’s workplace activity, but instead was redefined as something

experienced off the clock.
Paralleling this mechanization of everyday experience of work

was the development of large-scale integrated “technological

systems” to make such mechanization possible. Between 1870

and 1920 in the United States, enormous growth occurred in the

READING 91

development of electric power and light companies, telegraph and
telephone systems, the chemical industry, transportation systems,
and large-scale manufacturing. The mass production and distri­
bution of a commodity like an automobile called into existence
a complex constellation of variously skilled workers, suppliers,
subcontractors, managers, supervisors, clerks, transporters, deal­
ers, and service people. Railroad systems developed networks of
tracks, equipment, conductors, communication networks, and
ticket agents. Power grids were called into being as highways and
housing developments sprang up across the nation.

Complimenting this thoroughly modern evolution in material
goods were similarly scientific methods of everyday management. In
this era the doctrines ofTaylorsim and Fordism emerged to enhance
worker efficiency and workplace productivity, as employees came to
be seen more as components of the larger technological system than
as individuals. As labor became fragmented and systemized, new
regimes of rationality, efficiency, and order emerged in the edifice of
impersonal bureaucracies and hierarchical administrative structures.
In an atmosphere of economic growth driven by the imperatives of
the modern corporation, the ethos of the day was continual accel­
eration and accumulation. Over time, technology became invested
with “a host of metaphysical properties and potencies, thus making
it seem a determinate entity, a disembodied, autonomous, causal
agent of social change-of history. “56 The legacy of these early
technological systems and their ideological underpinnings of the
everyday are still with us today, manifest in the burgeoning biosci­
ence and information technology sectors that the popular media
tell us are fueling the nation’s economic recovery.

It is important to acknowledge the range of counterarguments
that have arisen to the systemization of everyday experience-and
especially during the post-World War II years-to question, con­
tradict, and negate the unproblematized premises of such utopian

92 CHAPTER THREE

visions of technological progress. Historian Andrew Feenberg has
used the term “technological substantivism” to describe various
strains of opposition to the overriding discourse of technological
instrumentalism.57 Substantive analyses do not see technology as
neutral, but instead view it as the embodiment of so,cial values.
An early skeptic of instrumentalism, Martin Heidegger wrote that
technology invariably creates relationships of control from which
people struggle in vain to free themselves. As a substance existing
throughout human history, the hidden secret of technology as a
controlling force became manifest in the modern era. “It is impos­
sible,” Heidegger wrote, “for man to imagine a position outside
of technology. “58

Jacques Ellul, among other substantive critics, further elabo­
rated on the distinct relationship of technology to daily life. To
Ellul, “technology has become autonomous” in its ability to
structure human actions and relationships. Ellul was responding
specifically to the way technological systems of the early twentieth
century became transformed into “technocracies”-or technologi­
cal bureaucracies-in which technology evolves into a branch of
politics.59 Within the autonomous logic of the technocracy, the
original scientific impetus to develop systems for the Enlightenment
goal of a better and more egalitarian society became subverted by
the solipsistic imperatives of technology itself. Ellul’ s technocracies
are self-replicating systems in which every action is rationalized as a
contribution to technological improvement and expansion. As such,
they constitute one of the primary means by which the Weberian
iron cage of bureaucracy becomes actualized.

These generalized notions of technological substantivism as­
sumed a degree of heightened potency and specificity in the years
following World War II. With Hiroshima, the nuclear arms race, and
the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, public anxieties began
to erode the unquestioned role of technology as an instrument of

READING 93

social good. As a myriad of technologically based domestic prod­
ucts, like television, were introduced into the home, other voices
were beginning to point out the environmental devastation cre­
ated by unchecked industrial expansion. By the end of the 1960s,
the student movements of the New Left had given technocracy a
name-the “military-industrial complex”-and were blaming it for
a plethora of social ills ranging from ecological devastation to the
corporate transformation of the university into the “multiversity.”
Activists sought a structural reorganization of technocracy to bet­
ter serve the interests of democracy. Such sentin1ents deepened in
the 1980s with the 1984 leakage of poisonous gas from a Union
Carbide Plant in Bhopal, India; the 1986 explosion of the Cher­
nobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Russia; the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil
spill off the shores of southeast Alaska; growing recognition of the
phenomena of acid rain, ozone depletion, and global w�rming; and
the social devastation of rust-belt communities brought on by the
collapse of heavy industry.

Slowly the topic of technology in everyday life began to emerge
as an issue of intellectual concern in a variety of disciplines. In addi­
tion to critiques from the antiwar and environmental movements,
important analyses of technology emerged from Marxist, feminist,
and poststructuralist circles. The Marxist arguments addressed
the overarching linkage of technology to markets. As discussed
by Andrew Ross, early on, technology was “dealt a hand in the
power structure of capitalism (which is increasingly dependent on
science-based industry), while its efficiency logic came to prevail
over scientific management of everyday life. “60 The systematic
effects of such social engineering have been widespread, from
the reorganization of labor to the industrialization of culture and
entertainment. This materialist critique differs from the substantive
view of technology as a menace in its own right. Although lend­
ing itself easily to market exploitation, technology in this view was

94 CHAPTER THREE

more a means than an end. As Ross concludes, “Capitalist reason,

not technical reason, is still the order of the day. “61

Feminist views of everyday technologies grew, at first, from

critiques of science as a patriarchal system practiced by men and

for men. Writers like Sandra Harding considered technology in

epistemological terms, asking: Whose interests are served by a

rationalist philosophy of science that posits the world in universal

terms? According to whose logic are “objective” certainties of

lmowledge established? This feminist interrogation of objectivism

soon gained currency in the social sciences, where the ethnocentric

underpinnings of Western rationalism were further revealed. The

answer to Harding’s rhetorical question “Is science multicultural?”

came back a resounding “no. “62 An important parallel to the femi­

nist critique of objectivism emerged in analyses of language and

representation. From such fundamental feminist issues as the cri­

tique of everyday speech emerged a more fi.tll-fledged inquiry into

the role of linguistics in the development of thought and identity.

Like objectivism, structuralist views of language offered a universal

grammar in which rules and characteristics remain consistent from

culture to culture. Also like objectivism, the structuralist view was

too broad as a way of understanding how meaning functions. The

feminist critique of t his singular world view was soon adapted by

visual theorists like Laura Mulvey and Teresa De Lauretis, who

d th d. fi: · ” h I . f d “63 analyze ways at me 1a mct1on as tee no og1es o gen er.

In the poststructuralist strain of this thinking, theorists ques­

tioned singular definitions of progress and rationality.64 Michel

Foucault, in particular, gained prominence in describing the

“technologies of power” embedded in social institutions or such

metaphorical constructs as the panopticon.65 Although celebrated

for their novelty, Foucault’s views on technology can be seen as

extensions of prior critiques of technocratic systems . For Fou­

cault, such systems create environments within which people are

READING 95

controlled, often unwittingly. Yet Foucault departs from earlier
analyses in his acknowledgement of the partial or contingent role
played by technology in the context of other influences. Perhaps
the most significant element in Foucault’s formulation lies in the
allowances he makes for human agency to resist or subvert “regimes
of domination” in productive terms.

The post-structuralist critique of science and technology also is
significant in its eschewal of essentialism. Many early determinist
and substantive views, as well as their critiques by Marxists and
feminists, constructed technology as an unchanging phenomenon
that carried the same characteristics across time and space. In view­
ing technology as a contingent entity that functions differently in
various contexts, post-structuralism suggests that technology is
not necessarily a linear and unstoppable force. This leaves open the
possibility for a view of technology as progressive, hence yielding a
critical space in which to engage its problems and potentials.

To Feenberg , this dialectical view holds importance in its critical
tolerance for rationality. Lilce it or not, rationalist objectivism holds
a solid lock on the real-life discourses of science, jurisprudence,

· and education, to name a few. As Feenberg writes,

Whatever the ultimate status of scientific-technical knowledge,
it is what we use for truth in making policy. We need fur more
specific arguments against technocracy that can play at that level.
Furthermore, it is implausible to dismiss rationality as merely a
Western myth and to flatten all distinctions which so obviously
differentiate modern from premodern society. There is something
special captured in notions such as modernization, rationaliza­
tion, and reification .66

As we recognize the problems with universal claims of “truth,”
the need persists for provisional or local truths that can be used in

96 CHAPTER THREE

communication. This is where everyday culture comes in. The task

of making meaning in each and every encounter is more complex

and labor intensive, but it also promises that differences will not

be elided as a matter of course. All of these issues have assumed

a greater complexity in recent years, with the introduction of ac­

cessible technology in the form of home computers and network

interfaces. Formerly abstract ideas about the role of technology in

everyday life have become a part of daily existence.

Notes

1. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “American Time Use Summary,” in

News (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor, 2005).

2. ‘Elizabeth Thoman and Tessa Jolls, Media Literacy: A National

Priority far a Changing World. http://wwmmedialit.01;g/reading_room/ ar­
ticle663.html. Accessed May 10, 2005.

3. Ibid.

4. Howard Gardner, Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences.

for the 21st Century (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 10.
5. “Trivium,” in Wikipedia, Jan. 22, 2007. http://en.wikipedia.

01:g/wiki/Trivium. Accessed Jan. 22, 2007.

6. Neil Postman, Amusing Otn-selves to Death: Public Discourse in

the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 44.
7. Ibid., 67.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 25.

10. Ibid., 24-25.

11. Ibid., 72.

12. Ibid., 72-73.

13. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, Gir­
oux, 1977), 20.

READING 97

14. Robert M. Diamond, “Single Room Television,” in A Guide to

Instructional Media, ed. Robert M. Diamond (New York: McGraw- Hill,

1964), 3.

15. John M. Hofstrand, “Television and Classroom Observation,”

in A Guide to Instructional Media, 149.
16. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man

(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 23.

17. The terms “visual literacy” and “media literacy” have been

employed in a variety of differing contexts during the past two decades.

The formalist media literacy of the 1970s should not be confused ·with

the critical media literacy movement of the 1980s and 1990s.

18. Linda R. Burnett and Frederick Goldman, Need Johnny Read?

Practical Methods to Enrich Humanities Courses Using Films and Film

Studies (Dayton: Pflaum, 1971 ), xv.

19. Cary Bazalgette, as quoted in Ben Moore, “Media Education,”

in The Media Studies Book (New York: Routledge, 1991), 172.

20. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of In­
terpretin Communities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).

21. Seymour Feshbach and Robert B. Singer, Television and Ag­

gression (New York: Jossey-Bass, 1971), 12.

22. Concerns over the degrading effects of gritty printed material

can be dated to the early decades of the nineteenth century. The intro­

duction of plate lithography in 1801 made possible the mass production

of books, pamphlets, and broadsides. In the United States, The National
Police Gazette, first published in 1833, arose to satisfy the public hunger

for stories of violent crime. History has demonstrated that periodic “moral

panics” over media seem to parallel the development of new communi­

cation technologies and the social changes they enable. The Guttenberg

press and the lithography process made pqssible dramatic leaps in the dis­

semination of written works. Both technologies allowed ordinary people

access to what had formerly been available only to the privileged. And it

made the elites nervous. This was certainly true in the mid-1800s, when

commentators began to link social problems of the industrial era to emerg­

ing forms of popular media, often evoking images of an idealized past free

I 04 CHAPTER THREE

com/html/opinion/2002228040_simdaygoodman03.html. Accessed Aug.

2, 2005.

51. Richard Coyne, Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism,

and the Romance of the Real ( Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999) . Citing Martin

Platte! and others, Coyne presents a detailed discussion of the way utopian

narratives reflect social anxieties.

52. Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access: The Ne1P Culture of Hyper­

capitalism, Where All of Life Is a Paid for Experience (New York: Putnam,

2000), 173.

53. Martin Heidegger, The Q;iestion of Technology, trans. W illiam

Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).

54. Leo Marx, “The Idea of Technology and Postmodern Pessi­

mism,” in Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism, eds. Yaron Ezrahi,

Everett Mendleson, and Howard P. Segal (Amherst: University of Mas­

sachusetts Press, 1995), 14.

55. Ibid.

56. Marx in Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodetnism, 19.

57. Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1991 ); Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay,

eds., Technology and the Politics of Knmvledge (Bloomington and India­

napolis: Indiana University Press, 1995); Andrew Feenberg, Questioning

Technology (New York and London: Routledge, 1998).

58. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and

Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 41.

59. Jacques Bllul, The Technological System, trans. Joachim Neugro­

schel (New York: Continuum, 1980).

60. Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Ciilture, Science, and Technology

in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991 ), 10.

61. Ibid.

62. Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms,

Feminisms, Epistemologies (Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of

Indiana, 1998).

63. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1989); Teresa De Lauretis, Technologies of Gender:

READING 105

Essays on T heory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1987).

64. See Bzrahi, Mendelsohn, and Segal, eds., Technology, Pessimism,

and Postmodernism.

65. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment, trans. Asheridan

(New York: Pantheon, 1977).

66. Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash: The Theory

of the VirtualClass(NewYork: Plagrave, 1994),4.

THE PEW FORUM DIALOGUES

ON RELIGION AND PUBLIC UFE

E.J. DIONNE JR. AND MICHAEL CROMARTIE
Series E.’ditors

This book series is a joint project of the Pew Forum on Religion
& Public Life and the Brookings Institution. The Forum
(www.pewforum.org) delivers timely, impartial information on
issues at the intersection of religion and public affairs and serves

THE PEW
as a neutral venue for discussing these important issues. The Pew

FORUM
Forum is a nonpartisan organi•z;ation and does not take positions

ON RELIGION on policy debates. Based in Washington, D.C., it is directed by
& PUBLIC LIFE Luis Lugo and is a project of the Pew Research Center.

‘I11e Pew Forum Dialogues on Religion and Public Life are short volumes that
bring together the voices of scholars, journalists, and policy leader. engaged simul­
taneously in the religious and policy realms. The core idea behind the dialogues is
a simple one: There are many authentically expert voices addressing important
public questions who speak not only from their knowledge of the policy issues, but
also from a set of moral concerns that are often shaped by their religious commit­
ments. The goal is to deepen public understanding of the issues by inviting these
voices to join in a dialogue.

OTHER TITLES IN THIS SER!ES

Is the Market Moral? A Dialogue on Religion, Economics, and Justice
Rebecca M. Blank and William McGum

Lib,rty and Power: A Dialogue on Religion and US. Foreign Poli,y in an Unjust World
J. Bryan Hehir, Michael Walzer, Louise Richardson, ShibleyTelhami,
Charles Krauthammer, and James Lindsay

Lifting Up the Poor: A Dialogue on Religion, Poverty, and Welfare Reform
Mary Jo Bane and Lawrence M. Mead

One Elect(lfatt under God? A Dialogue rm Religion and American Politics
Mario Cuomoi Mark Souder, and others

Is THERE A

CULTURE WAR?

A DIALOGUE ON VALUES AND

AMER1CAN PUBLIC LIFE

]AMES DAVISON HUNTER

ALAN WOLFE

PEW RESEARCH CENTER

BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS

Washington, D. C.

THE ENDURING CULTURE WAR

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER

LrnERALISM, AS A philosophical movement and cluster of political ideals, is
rooted in the challenges of difference. Liberalism was, in large part, an
attempt to provide a humane solution to the difficulties posed by the
coexistence of a plurality of dissimilar communities in shared political
order. The differences that originally animated liberalism were differences
of the most profound sort, those over competing understandings of the
good and the sources by which those understandings are known and prac­
ticed-most important, religious and metaphysical differences. It is a
conundrum indeed when individuals and communities hold competing
views of the good that they regard as sacred and, therefore, nonnegotiable.
Historically speaking, tension, intolerance, conflict, oppression, violence,
and carnage are the natural outcomes of this dilemma. No wonder that
difference and diversity have continued to bedevil the best minds in polit­
ical theory over the last three centuries.

The question of liberalism provides one important context for explor­
ing the debate over the culture war because the subtext of this debate is,
in fact, the question of difference in our own time and the conflict that
such diversity engenders. To pose the question, “Is there a culture war?” is,

I would like to thank Patrick LaRochelle and Emily Raudenbush for their
invaluable research assistance on this essay. I am also very grateful to my colleagues
Joseph Davis, Jennifer Geddes, Charles Mathewes, Murray Milner, and John
Owen for their critical reading of the piece.

10

The Enduring Culture War

implicitly, to ask a prior question, “Are there politically significant differ­
ences operating h ere?” If so-and in this debate, that is a huge “if”­
what is the nature and meaning of the differences involved? And what is
the historical significance of these differences?

As it has always been, what is at stake in these questions is liberalism
itself as it seeks to offer, in ever new and challenging contexts, a frame­
work for toleration, freedom, and justice. Who is a member of the polit­
ical community? Whose voices are taken seriously and whose grievances

are legitimate? When new claims are made and criticisms expressed, how

do the institutions of liberal democracy integrate them and mediate
them?

In some ways, the story of liberal democracy in America could be told
in terms of the expansion of difference and the way the institutions of
democracy have ultimately incorporated those differences into the shared
political community. Time and again, the ideals and habits of liberalism
h ave been tested by communities, traditions, and interests seeking a

reconfiguration of existing understandings of legitimate difference. Over
the last century and a half, Catholics, Jews, women, African Americans,
Hispanics, a range of other ethnic minorities, and homosexuals have all
challenged the established order, and though circumstances are far from
perfect, few would disagree that the range of legitimate difference has
been expanded and that conditions for each group have dramatically
improved.

In the last half of the twentieth century, it was widely presumed that
distinctions of faith and religious community had been largely settled and
were thus no longer politically important. The Catholicism of John F.
Kennedy in the 1960 election was the exception that proved the rule, and
in this sense, it was the last gasp of a dying fear. In the main, the sense
prevailed that every religious faith had been domesticated through its rel­
egation to the private sphere. The diversity that mattered now was a
diversity of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual or ientation. These
have occupied an enormous amount of time and attention over the last
forty to fifty years and, as I mentioned, to great effect.

But something unexpected is suggested by the idea of a “culture war,”
especially as it was first articulated. It suggests that the contours of differ­
ence have changed yet again in ways that raise a troubling possibility:

11

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER

though configured in ways that are unfamiliar and possibly unprece­
dented, perhaps religious and moral differences remain politically conse­
quential in late modern America after all. Perhaps, long after it was
thought settled, the normative differences rooted in sacred cosmologies
(and the communities in which they are embedded) have come to chal­
lenge the project of liberal democracy again.

The Culture War Hypothesis . . .

In the late 1980s, I became curious about two phenomena. The first was
a question about whether seemingly disparate social, moral, and political
issues were tied together in some way. What do the arts have to do with
abortion? What does the protest against nuclear power or smoking in
public places have to do with gay rights? Studies had been done on sepa­
rate issues and separate movements, but there seemed to be points of sym­
metry and even connection that were not being explored or discussed.
Was there something at play in these disparate issues that linked them
together? Many of these conflicts were playing out in local settings around
the country with no connection to each other; yet across the range of
issues, the lines of division were similar, the rhetorical strategies and cul­
tural motifs were comparable, and the patterns of engagement were alike.
Might there be a cultural thread that could make sense of this confusing
jumble?

The second phenomenon concerned who was lining up on different
sides of different issues and why they were doing so. One does not have
to know much about American or Western history to know that when
Protestants, Catholics, and Jews are talking and working together and
even forming alliances in unusual and contradictory ways, that something
counterintuitive and perhaps unprecedented is taking place. Given the
appalling legacy of anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism in the United
States alone, these developments were remarkable and, on the face of it,
historically significant.

Something was going on, but how best to account for it?
One of the central questions of sociological theory concerns how a

social order is constituted and legitimated. To be sure, categories rooted in
economic and class interest-the categories of “left” and “right”-were

12

The Enduring Culture War

useful as long as they reflected the dominant axis of political tension. But
with the collapse of state socialism abroad and the disarray of the labor
movement, philosophical Marxism in the academy, and Keynesianism at
home, the explanatory power of those categories had weakened, to say
the least. Indeed, it is striking just how inadequate social class as a variable
(or, for that matter, the categories deriving from political economy) is in
accounting for variance in this conflict-in general and in the particulars.
This has been particularly true in the United States. The axis of tension
that the terms left and right originally described was just not as salient in
making sense of political conflict and social change as it once was.

Neither was standard demographic analysis, the staple of sociological
practice. Education and residence accounted for some part of the variance,
as did gender, though there were highly educated and moderately edu­
cated people on all sides of these issues. Similarly, urban dwellers could be
found on all sides of these issues, and women were also divided on most of
these social issues (and not insignificantly, on abortion). One could find
associations in age and occupation, but these too were weak. All ages and
all occupations could be found taking most every position. None of these
factors individually or together offered a coherent explanation.

Nor could any of these older models explain the passion, commitment,
and sacrifice of the actors involved. Something was going on that main­
stream social science was either ignoring or for which it could not provide
a good explanation. The argument about the culture war was an attempt
to address this puzzle.

The heart of the culture war argument was that American public cul­
ture was undergoing a realignment that, in turn, was generating signifi­
cant tension and conflict. These antagonisms were playing out not just on
the surface of social life (that is, in its cultural politics) but at the deepest
and most profound levels, and not just at the level of ideology but in its
public symbols, its myths, its discourse, and through the institutional
structures that generate and sustain public culture.

Thus underneath the myriad political controversies over so-called cul­
tural issues, there were yet deeper crises over the very meaning and pur­
pose of the core institutions of American civilization. Behind the politics
of abortion was a controversy over a momentous debate over the meaning
of motherhood, of individual liberty, and of our obligations to one

13

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER

another. Within the politics of government patronage, including the dis­
pute over the National Endowment for the Arts and its funding of con­
troversial art, one could find a more consequential dispute over what con­

stitutes art in the first place and the social ideals it symbolically
communicates. Beyond the politics of educational curriculum, the quar­
rels over textbooks in public schools constituted a more serious disagree­
ment over the national ideals Americans pass on to the next generation.

Behind the contentious argument about the legal rights of gays and les­
bians was a more serious debate over the fundamental nature of the fam­

ily and appropriate sexuality. Within the politics of church and state, the
various (and seemingly trivial) altercations over Ten Commandment pre­
sentations on public property overlaid a more significant debate about the
role of religious institutions and religious authority in an increasingly sec­

ular society. And so it goes. Cumulatively, these debates concerning the
wide range of social institutions amounted to a struggle over the meaning
of America.

This, however, was not the end of the matter. Underneath the push and
pull of these institutional conflicts were competing moral ideals as to how
public life ought to be ordered and maintained. These were not mere
political ideologies, reducible to party platforms or political scorecards,
but rather moral visions from which the policy discussions and political
disputes derived their passion. Embedded within institutions, these ideals
were articulated in innumerable ways with every conceivable nuance and
shade of variation. As they were translated into the signs and symbols of pub­
lic discourse, however, they lost their complexity and nuance and thus
divided into sharply antagonistic tendencies.

One moral vision-the traditionalist or orthodox-is predicated upon
the achievements and traditions of the past as the foundation and guide
to the challenges of the present. Though this vision is often tinged with
nostalgia and is at times resistant to change, it is not simply reactionary,
backward looking, or static. Rather, the order of life sustained by this
vision is, at its best, one that seeks deliberate continuity with the ordering

principles inherited from the past. The social end is the reinvigoration
and realization of what are considered to be the very noblest ideals and
achievements of civilization.

14

The Enduring Culture War

Against this is a progressivist moral vision that is ambivalent to the
legacy of the past, regarding it partly as a useful point of reference and
partly as a source of oppression. Instead, the order of life embraced by this
vision is one that idealizes experimentation and thus adaptation to and
innovation with the changing circumstances of our time. Although some­
times marked by traces of utopian idealism, it is not merely an uncritical
embrace of all things new. The aim of the progressivists’ vision is the fur­
ther emancipation of the human spirit and the creation of an inclusive and
tolerant world.

But here, too, there is more to say. Underneath the public policy dis­
putes, the institutional crises, and the conflicting moral visions, there were

and are different and competing understandings of what is real and the
means by which we can know what is real, and of what is good and true and
the means by which we can know these things. Here, too, among citizens
and within institutions, one can find nearly infinite variations. As these have
become transformed into a grammar of public discourse, however, one can

discern two different and competing impulses. Animating one side of the
cultural divide is a sense of ultimate reality that is rooted in transcendent
authority. Whether apprehended through the foundations of nature or reli­
gion or tradition, one can discern and articulate relatively fixed, even eter­
nal, standards through which we can justly organize our personal and col­
lective existence. Animating the other side of the cultural divide is a sense
of ultimate reality that rejects the possibility of fixed standards outside of
human experience, privileging instead that which we can apprehend
through our senses from our personal experience. By these lights, what is
real or what is good is not so much constant and enduring but rather much
more personal and dependent on the particularities of context.

In sum, at the root of this conflict are competing understandings of the
good and how the good is grounded and legitimated. These understand­
ings are reflected in competing moral visions of collective life and the dis­
course sustaining those visions. In turn, these are manifested in compet­
ing institutions (their elites and their interests) that generate this cultural
output. All of this plays out dialectically.

Another way to say this is that against the old axis of tension and con­
flict that was rooted in political economy, a “new” axis of tension and

15

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER

conflict has emerged that is fundamentally cultural in nature. The his­
torical significance of this new axis has been evident in the ways in which
it cuts across age-old divisions among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.
The orthodox traditions in these faiths now have much more in common
with each other than they do with progressives in their own faith tradi­
tion, and vice versa. The polarity of this axis seems to better account for
the variation in positions on a wide range of popular domestic disputes.
In turn, it is the polarities of these controversies through which a far­
reaching struggle for national identity is casried on.

It is important to bracket the modifier “new” when describing these
tensions because they have existed and become institutionalized in the
West since at least the mid-1700s. For the most past, however, these ten­
sions remained isolated within fairly remote philosophical discourse,
arcane ecclesiastical disputes, or, at most, legal conflict over the constitu­
tion of the state. It is only since the 1960s and 1970s that these tensions
have played out within populas domestic politics.’ The historical signifi­
cance of these tensions, however, could be measured by a realignment tak­
ing place within the larger public culture. The politically significant dis­
tinctions in American public religion and culture, it seemed, were no
longer those between Protestants, Catholics,Jews, and secularists, as they
had been for several centuries. Rather, the more salient distinction was
between orthodox and progressivist impulses and tendencies within major
religio-philosophical traditions. The result has been a historically
unprecedented set of alliances among conservative religio-cultural fac­
tions and among progressivist religio-cultural factions that have played
out in public policy disputes and in opposing nationalist rhetoric.

Given the Enlightenment-based assumptions about intellectual dis­
course in the last century, it is counterintuitive to suggest that “religion” is
at all relevant to a discussion about the ordering of public life. But the
institutional manifestations of religion merely point to the normative
foundations by which any society, including late twentieth-century Amer­
ica, is constituted and legitimated. As Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl
Marx, and Georg Simmel well understood, religion-broadly defined as
systems of sacred meaning-was anything but irrelevant to the dynamics
of conflict and change in the nineteenth century. Broadly conceived, the
culture war hypothesis proposes that it remains just as central today.

16

The Enduring Culture War

. . . and Its Critics

Not long after the culture war hypothesis was laid out, a small cottage in­
dustry of academic sociologists and political scientists emerged to counter
the argument. Over the years, the criticism has been substantial and em­

phatic. The position is unwavering and resolute: no mincing of words and
few, if any, qualifications. Steven Brint declared flatly, “There is no culture
war in America.”2 Christian Smith and colleagues stated that “the culture
war is a myth.”‘ Paul DiMaggio and his colleagues concluded that, with
the exception of abortion, there was “no support for the proposition that
the United States has experienced dramatic polarization in public opinion
on social issues.”4 According to Nancy Davis and Robert Robinson, the
image of warring factions locked in struggle “is simply false.” There is no
“monolithic conservative phalanx marching lockstep to the tune of such
groups as the Christian Coalition.”‘ Ultimately, they declared, the culture
war “exists mainly in the minds of media pundits, leaders of political

movements, and academics.”6 Such stark demarcations of cultural differ­
ence do not-indeed canno�xist, as Randall Balmer noted, because of
the “relative absence of ideology in American politics, culture, or reli­
gion.”7 Jeremy Rabkin made a similar case for ”the culture war that isn’t.”8

Alan Wolfe concluded in a like manner, noting that there “is little truth

to the charge that middle-class Americans, divided by a culture war, have
split into two hostile camps.”‘ Wayne Baker echoed this view, saying “that
the culture war .is largely a fiction.”10 In the latest in this run of criticism,
Morris Fiorina declared what had already been said many times before:
“The culture war script embraced by journalists and politicos lies some­
where between simple exaggeration and sheer nonsense. There is no cul­
ture war in the U.S.-no battle for the soul of America rages, at least
none that most Americans are aware of.”11 The polarizing impulses of the
culture war are, then, a fabrication. The obverse, in fact, is true. As Wolfe

put it, America is “one nation, after all.” As such, the time has since long
come for social observers to

1

‘move beyond the culture war.”12

In answer to the question about the nature and significance of the
wide-ranging social and cultural issues playing out in public life, then,
these critics argued, in effect, that nothing of particular consequence was
occurring at all. These controversies have no parti cular meaning and,

17

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER

therefore, do not need further examination, exploration, or discussion
because there is no significant normative conflict in America. No alterna­
tive explanations are needed because there are no politically consequential
religio-cultural differences in America. And all of these categorical judg­
ments were being made in the context of the Clarence Thomas Senate
confirmation controversy (a foreshadowing of the current debates over
Supreme Court justices); the sex-saturated politics of the impeachment of
the forty-second U.S. president; the rise of Fox News and its overt politi­
cization of television journalism; the polarizing dynamics of three presi­
dential elections, including the ongoing realignment of the major parties;
and the continuing battles over gay rights that have included thirteen
state referendums outlawing gay marriage, not to mention innumerable
local controversies around the country that divided churches, schools,
neighborhoods, and communities.

How does one explain such stark dis1:1greement over the existence,
much less the meaning, of cultural conflict? There are at least three areas
that bear further scrutiny. The most obvious concerns the conceptual and
methodological differences that may be at play. Are different positions in
the debate over the culture war actually referring to and assessing the
same thing? The second area is the empirical reality. What are the critics
focusing upon and what are they ignoring in order to make their case?
The third area concerns the theoretical assumptions brought to bear on
the subject of cultural conflict and whether those assumptions are realis­
tic and credible.

Conceptual and Methodological Considerations:
The Nature and Meaning of Culture

One explanation for the striking divergence of opinion has to do with
culture itself-that which is, or perhaps is not, “at war.” What is the nature
of culture? How do social scientists understand it conceptually and
approach it methodologically?

One common way of thinking about culture is in terms of the prevail­
ing values and norms found in a society. These norms and values are com­
posed of the attitudes and opinions, beliefs, and moral preferences of indi­
viduals. Culture, then, is the sum total of attitudes, values, and opinions of

18

The Enduring Culture War

the individuals making up a society. This view of culture became especially
popular among social scientists in the 1950s and 1960s. New develop­
ments in public opinion surveys at that time reinforced this approach by
providing more refined techniques for sampling average Americans and
recording their personal points of view. One school of thought in this vein
regarded culture and personality as roughly symmetrical, as mirroring
each other. In this view culture was little more than the personality of its
individual members writ large, its modal character type or types; under­
standing culture, in turn, provided a window on the psyche of its individ­
ual members. Even after the “culture and personality” studies went out of
fashion, survey research and the view of culture it implied remained a
dominant approach to culture in the social sciences.

As much as survey research had advanced the understanding of social
life, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, American sociology was beginning
to recognize the weaknesses of this approach to culture. The method­
ological individualism implied in survey methods came to be seen by
many as narrowly conceived, limited in scope, reductionistic in its claims,
and, in the end, facile in its explanations. In general, the view that culture
was simply the sum total of subjective attitudes and opinions of ordinary
people was seen as inadequate by itself to account for the complexity of
culture. Surveys proved important to social analysis, but alone they were
insufficient to explain the intricacies of social life.

At the same time, American cultural sociology discovered afresh the
contributions and relevance of neoclassical, structural, and poststructural
approaches to the study of culture that had been established and further
developed in Continental and British social theory.13 This led to a greater
focus on the patterns of culture, its institutional dimensions, its production
within organizations, the artifacts it produced, the resources mobilized
behind it, the elites who wielded disproportionate influence in articulating
the guiding narratives, and so on. It also gave impetus to understanding
public symbols and rituals, public discourse, the unspoken structures of
authority, and how all of these things relate to the formation of collective
identity and to the public philosophies and shared narratives that legiti­
mate its claims.

It is in the context of this evolving history in social science and the
changing conceptual and methodological strategies for understanding

19

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER

culture that we begin to see how two different positions on the culture
war debate have emerged. To wit, all of the empirical tests of the culture
wars hypothesis-al/ of them-have been based exclusively upon
individual-level data from either public opinion surveys or face-to-face
interviews. The result has been predictable: on the whole, American pub­
lic opinion simply did not reflect the divisions described by the argu­
ment of deep normative conflict. Paul DiMaggio and his colleagues, for
example, reviewed survey data from the General Social Sur vey (GSS)
and the National Election Studies (NES) from the early 1970s to the
mid-1990s and found that, with the exception of abortion, there was “no
support for the proposition that the United States has experienced dra­
matic polarization in public opinion on social issues.”14 Davis and Robin­
son also drew from the GSS and concluded that “most Americans occupy
a middle ground between the extremes.”15 A dissertation by Yonghe Yang
in 1996 covered much the same ground in the GSS (from 1977 to 1996)
and found “no hint of ideological dichotomy.”16 Wolfe interviewed
dozens of people from eight different communities and found much the
same. 17 Smith and his coworkers conducted in-depth interviews of
128 individuals and found that most people were oblivious to the very
concept of a culture war, and among those who had heard of it, most
were disdainful of the idea. 18 Baker’s work was based upon the World
Values Survey, and Fiorina’s study was based primarily on a review of
analyses of GSS, NES, and Gallup public opinion data. 19 In sum, all of
the criticisms of the culture war hypothesis were based on an implicit
view of culture and an older form of cultural analysis that were, to say the
least, limited from the outset.

Collective psychology is fine as far it goes; it can teach much about the
patterns and trends of opinion and belief. But the argument about a culture
war in America was based upon a different understanding of culture, one
that was strongly influenced by the structural tum in cultural analysis. This
tum viewed culture not as the norms and values residing in people’s heads
and hearts but rather as systems of symbols and other cultural artifacts,
institutions that produce and promulgate those symbols, discourses that
articulate and legitimate particular interests, and competing fields where
culture is contested. For my own part, the heart of the culture war hypoth­
esis was the contention that there had been a realignment in American

20

The Enduring Culture War

public culture that had been and still is institutionalized chiefly through
special interest organizations, denominations, political parties, founda­
tions, competing media outlets, professional associations, and the elites
whose ideals, interests, and actions give all of these organizations direction
and leadership. These dynamics played out in different ways in different
cultural fields. In all, the dynamics of collective identity formation-the
necessity for an “other” to clarify the moral boundaries of the group and
reinforce the moral authority of its elites–added force to the polarizing
impulses at work. Even further, the polarizing tendencies of competing
fields of cultural production were aggravated by the technologies of public
discourse. Through these structural developments and processes, compet­
ing moral visions and the conflict itself have become, in Durkheim’s
phrase, a reality sui generis, a reality much larger than-indeed, au­
tonomous from-the sum total of individuals and organizations that give
expression to the conflict. It was and is only at this level that the term cul­
ture war–with its implications of stridency, polarization, mobilization of
resources, and so on-has its greatest conceptual force.20 It explains,
among other things, how it is that our public discourse becomes disem­
bodied from (and hence larger than and independent of) the individual
voices that give it expression. In this way it explains how our public dis­
course becomes more polarized than Americans as a people are.

It is true that some critical commentary never engaged the scholarly
works that put forward the idea of cultural conflict but rather focused on
the popular usage of the term.” W hile one would think that the scholars’
more sophisticated understanding of a popular concept would invite a
more rigorous conceptualization and analysis, this was not the case. As
such, references to popular treatments tended to slide seamlessly into cita­
tions of more scholarly sources, with the net effect being to render suspect
any use of the term culture war. In the end many of the critics created a
straw man that then proved relatively easy to knock down.

The problem is, none of the critics addressed the culture in culture wars.
None of them examined the question of the culture war from the theoret­
ical, conceptual, or methodological approaches of the new sociology of cul­
ture. None examined the structures of culture that produce and distribute
symbols, ideas, arguments, and ideologies; their social location and their

interests; their implicit formulations of moral authority; the antagonistic

21

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER

discourses; and so on. Rather, ever y criticism was based upon the most
narrow and constricted conceptualization of culture, thus looking for con­
flict where the conflict has always been weakest (for example, the average
opinions found in public opinion). From this came the authoritative con­
clusion that politically consequential normative conflict was simply non­
existent. Not to put too fine a point on it, the culture war argument has
always been about culture, in all its complexity of meaning within the
social sciences, and the conflict that continues to unfold in, around, and
through ir—and not about conflict over the attitudes and opinions of aver­
age Americans. It is in this way that the critics have overstated their case.
Their data simply cannot support the conclusion that significant cultural
conflict is nonexistent and, therefore, imaginary.

A False Debate?

On the face of it, then, the disagreement between those who propose and
those who reject the culture war hypothesis would seem to be conceptual
and methodological, not substantive in nature. Given such differences in
approach, it is difficult to imagine that there would not be differences in
conclusion.

That said, it must also be noted that many of the empirical assessments
of public attitudes have been quite serious, perceptive, and helpful. With
the exception discussed later in this essay, it is difficult not to agree with
much of what has been written about the popular sentiment of average
Americans. W ithin the actual limits that their data allow, there is little to
dispute.

For my own part, I have spent considerable effort elaborating these
very insights. In my earliest work on evangelicals, I found among these
most conservative of Americans strong tendencies toward accommodat­

ing liberal modernity; not only in their attitudes toward the family, work,
and the self but in their understanding of Scripture and core beliefs. In
Culture Wars I acknowledged again and again the prevalence of complex­
ity and nuance outside the framework of the polarizing tendencies, and an
entire chapter was devoted to the way in which the voices of the majority
in the middle are eclipsed.22 For the book Before the Shooting Begins, I
drew from a national survey of opinion involving face-to-face interviews

22

The Enduring Culture War

with over 2,000 Americans to explore the complexity of public attitudes
toward abortion-the consummate culture wars issue.

23

The middle, it
turns out, is quite diverse in its views. On the abortion issue, about 65 per­
cent of the population hold positions in between the extremes, and
though not radical in any of their views, neither were their views a mud­

dle, as many have thought. There is a very interesting structure to public
opinion among Americans who occupy the middle ground on this issue
that represents neither polarization nor consensus.

In 1996 the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture sponsored an­
other survey of political culture in America and found a similar dynamic
in the middle that reflected neither contented harmony nor seething dis­
cord.24 My colleague Carl Bowman and I approached the question of the
middle from a slightly different vantage point here.

25

Our objective was to
go beyond what people think is right or wrong regarding different issues
to determine the framework of people’s commitments to public culture
and, in this way, to explore how the public is divided in its normative
commitments. By “framework of people’s commitments,” we meant the
terms by which the moral is conceived by individuals-for themselves per­
sonally and the larger society. We constructed indexes that measured key
moral priorities: the relative commitment to self versus others, to univer­
sal truth versus particular (and relative) truths, and to traditional moral
codes as guidelines for one’s life.26 We then performed a cluster analysis to
identify subgroups of the population that differ significantly in their core
commitments.

We found a remarkable range of moral diversity between the extremes
of traditionalism and permissivism. Roughly 15 percent of the population
can be characterized as conventionalists–a moderate-to-conservative
group whose cultural orientation seems to be more a matter of form and

longstanding practice than conviction. About 14 percent can be loosely
characterized as pragmatists who tend to be traditional in their moral
beliefs and understanding of truth but who are the least self-sacrificial
and most hedonistic of all. Finally, about one-fifth of the population was
communitarian. In general, communitarians are religious liberals who,
while fairly skeptical about traditional morality and epistemology, are dis­
tinctive in their desire to subordinate personal gain on behalf of collective
needs or interests. Within this complex pattern of normative diversity, we

23

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER

found factions operating with very different moral languages and con­
ceiving of their public commitments in different ways. Moreover, they
tend to view opposing sides in complex ways. They find the elites of the
progressive left appealing, in many respects, for they embody the Ameri­
can dream of achievement, security, and mobility; they symbolize the suc­
cess of the system. At the same time, the average American is put off by
their aloofness, arrogance, and perceived self-interestedness. By contrast,
the Christian right has appeal within the larger public for its patriotism
and its defense of a traditional middle-class work, moral, and familial
ethic. Yet the public is simultaneously repelled by what it perceives as the
Christian right’s rigidity, intolerance, and extremism.

To be sure, the relationship of the larger public to American political
culture is exceedingly complex. My own contributions to understanding
average Americans “in the middle” are in sympathy with precisely what
the critics of the culture wars hypothesis have found. But this does not
mean that there are no politically significant cleavages in the culture–or
in popular opinion, as it turns out.

Empirical Considerations:
The Social Composition of Dissensus

To find significant difference in the general population, one has to know
where to look for it and then explore its meaning in relation to the larger
social order. What, then, can be said for the true believers on each side
within the general population?

First, the data set of choice for many of the criticisms of the culture
wars hypothesis was the General Social Survey, and as most social scien­
tists acknowledge, the GSS is at best a crude instrument for evaluating
public opinion. This is especially true regarding dissensus, since few if any
of its questions thoughtfully target the subsamples that make up contest­
ing factions or have been written with the substantive issues of conflict in

mind. That said, it is clear even from these data that there are substantial
minorities within the American public whose moral and political orien­
tations are strikingly at odds. Their attitudes and opinions also divide
much like one would expect from the discourse of the culture wars.

24

The Enduring Culture War

Though one can haggle over precise figures, virtually everyone agrees that
somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of the population occupy these
opposing moral and ideological universes.

There are different ways of slicing the pie. For example, in terms of
political self-identification, the 1996 Survey of American Political Culture
found 9 percent who identified their politics as very liberal to far left and
12 percent who described their politics as very conservative to far right. It
is a start but, of course, also a fairly crude measure. Regarding specific
issues that constitute the politics of the culture war, one also finds apprax:­
imately 8 to 12 percent who take strong and uncompromising positions
on one side or another. They are not always the same people, but the per­
centages work out about the same from issue to issue.

Still another way to slice the pie is to combine various moral, religious,
and political factors to identify the strongly committed partisans of the
Christian right and of the progressive left. Here again, by conservative
estimates, these individuals constitute about 5 to 7 percent of the popula­
tion on each side. Partisans on each side strongly affirm their commit­
ment to American political ideals and are highly involved in civic and
political affairs, having significantly more ties to various associations than
those who occupy the middle ground.” However, individuals in each fac­
tion have a very different understanding of the world and their experience
in it. They are, in some of the most significant ways, 1’worlds apart.” In our
analysis of the 1996 Survey of American Political Culture, Bowman and I
found that there were some differences in social class (with progressives in
the upper middle class and conservatives in the middle of the middle
class) but less than one might think. Partisans on each side also operate
with distinct and fondamentally different understandings of the moral
life and moral authority: one group operates from a biblical foundation
that tends toward absolutism that reinforces traditional values, while the
other tends toward moral improvisation and, in rare instances, relativism
that predisposes its members to ambivalence toward traditional moral
codes.28 While both factions strongly affirm the ideals of the American
democratic tradition, they understand this tradition differently; at key
points they are at odds in their understanding of American history and
purpose, and work with different interpretations of the American creed.

29

25

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER

Not least is the degree to which each faction is self-conscious of the other
and, as such, self-consciously antagonistic toward the other.30 Majorities
in each faction view the other as hypocritical, characterless, self-serving,

insensitive to the concerns of most Americans, out of the mainstream,
out-of-touch with reality, and undemocratic.

31

To broaden the analysis, one can look at those who form the larger
base, whose view of the world is sympathetic with the most strongly com­
mitted partisans though not nearly as resolutely or as coherently. One
fruitful way to approach this is not in political terms but rather in terms
of how people make sense of moral reality. In the cluster analysis men­
tioned earlier, Bowman and I found roughly one-fourth of the population
who could be called traditionalists (or neotraditionalists) and about one­
fourth who could be called permissivists.32 The traditionalists and neo­
traditionalists are, in terms of their commitment to traditional morality,

self-sacrifice, and a belief in absolutes, the most conservative people in
America today. The traditionalists are overwhelmingly and conservatively
theistic in their religious stances and operate with a providentialist view of

American history; the neotraditionalists are much the same though they
differ by virtue of their better education, urban residence, and representa­
tion among racial and ethnic minorities. Inhabiting a fundamentally dif­
ferent moral universe are the permissivists, who make up about

27

percent
of the American population. These individuals are perhaps the most sec­
ular of all Americans, the most lenient toward traditional morality, the
most relativistic toward truth, and among the least self-sacrificial in
weighing personal interests against the common good. Urban permis­
sivists tend to be younger and more diverse racially and ethnically com­
pared to their small-town counterparts.

It is clear that within themselves, traditionalists and permissivists do
not have political positions that align perfectly with their moral disposi­
tions. Yet the alignment is fairly close, and for this reason these groups
represent a natural and broader constituency receptive to political and
social mobilization.

33

The point is this: no matter how one approaches the question, social
dissensus is very much present in public opinion. Forming the grassroots

support for competing visions are factions that constitute the white-hot

26

The Enduring Culture Uar

core of difference and dissensus. Disproportionately motivated and active
in these issues, they are the most likely to write letters, send checks to the
special interest groups and parties that represent them, and volunteer on
behalf of their cause. Although these highly partisan citizens may only
make up 5 percent of the American population on one side of the cultural
divide or the other, in actual numbers they account for 10 to 12 million
people on each side. Extending out to less committed constituencies, the
numbers who align themselves on one side of the cultural divide or the
other can range up to 60 million each.

But this still leaves open the question, are these factions and the larger
constituencies of which they are a part politically significant? In his review
of Culture Warr for Contemporary Sociology, Steven Brint posed the ques­
tion this way: “Can one have a proper war when two-thirds of the army
are noncombatants?”34 The answer brings us back to one of the central
contentions of the original argument about the culture war: it has every­
thing to do with the institutions and elites that provide leadership to these
factions.

The Work of Elites and the Institutions They Lead

Some of the critics of the culture wars hypothesis do acknowledge that
there are activists who are engaged in these issues, but they have tended
to view them as noisy extremists who have no particular influence. Wolfe
isolates the conflict to “intellectuals.”

35

Fiorina prefers to call the typical
activist an “exhibitionist, crack-pot, blowhard.”36 Smith and colleagues
declare the conflict at this level “distant and trivial.”37 Yet because histor­
ical or empirical evidence has not been offered, it turns out that these
statements are merely opinion. They beg the question, what is the role of
elites? What role do the institutions they lead have in a culture? And what
of the activists and the movements they constitute?

To take the structural and institutional approach in cultural analysis is,
in part, to think of culture as objects produced. Culture takes the form of
ideas, information, news-indeed, knowledge of all kinds–and these in
turn are expressed in pronouncements, speeches, edicts, tracts, essays,
books, film, works of art, laws, and the like. At the heart of the production

27

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER

and distribution of cultural output is language. It is, of course, at the root
of culture for it provides a medium through which people experience real­
ity. Through both its structure and its meaning, language provides the cat­
egories through which people understand themselves, others, and the
larger world around them. The power oflanguage resides in its ability to
objectify, to make identifiable and “objectively” real the various and ever
changing aspects of our experience. When objects are named, when rela­
tionships are described, when standards of evaluation are articulated, and
when situations are defined, they can acquire a sense of facticity. For this
reason formal education, the media of mass communications (including
television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the like), art and music, and
religious pronouncements (such as sermons, edicts, policy statements,
moral instruction, liturgies and rituals, and the like) all become important
conduits for communication and socialization-me chanisms through
which a particular vision of reality is defined and maintained. It stands to
reason that influence over language, the cultural output through which
public language is mediated, and the institutions that produce and manage
it all are extraordinarily powerful.”

The development and articulation of the more elaborate systems of
meaning and the vocabularies that make them coherent are more or less
exclusively the realm of elites. They are the ones who provide the con­
cepts, supply the grammar, and explicate the logic of public discussion.
They are the ones who define and redefine the meaning of public symbols
and provide the legitimating or delegitimating narratives of public figures
or events. In all of these ways and for all of these reasons, it is they and the
strategically placed institutions they serve that come to frame the terms of
public discussion.

39

In sum, there are elites who are enormously influential for the sway
they have over the content and direction of cultural production within
specific institutions. These are supported by 5 to 8 percent of the popula­
tion who are the grassroots activists, the “cultural warriors” who generate
and organize resources on behalf of their respective associations and fac­
tions. There are yet larger parts of the population whose fundamental ori­
entation leans one way or another but who also tend to be more moder­
ate and less motivated. Yet they can and are mobilized for action in public
affairs (even if only by voting) under certain circumstances.

28

The Enduring Culture War

A Case Study, Repeated Myriad Times

Consider briefly a case concerning school reform in Gaston County,
North Carolina, in the early 1990s. 40 The school district there was ranked
among the bottom 17 school districts in the state (out of 120) in terms of
students’ academic performance, high dropout rates, and so on. To rectify
this matter, the Board of Education put together the Odyssey Project that
incorporated five elements of reform, including a change in pedagogy
called “outcomes-based education.” The school district won a $2 million
grant as the beginning of a $20 million grant in a national competition to
implement this reform. Through the work of a local Baptist pastor who
drew on the support and materials of Citizens for Excellence in Education
(CEE)-a religiously based, special interest organization concerned about
secular reforms in the public schools-an opposition was mobilized. The
CEE was dead set against outcomes-based education, saying it manipu­
lated and indoctrinated children with secular humanism, New Age think­
ing, and hostility to Christianity. As its director put it, outcomes-based
education marked “the end of academic education in America.”

41

It was
not long before parents and other citizens “packed school board meetings
where they monopolized the use of the microphone, harassed school board
members, wrote letters to local newspapers, distributed fliers urging par­
ents to act swiftly in order to save their children from the dire effects of
this ‘radical’ school program, circulated warnings [ through email] and
gathered signatures on petitions.”42

Soon enough, another national special interest organization, People for
the American Way, became involved in direct ways. People for the Amer­
ican Way claimed that the CEE and other organizations of the religious
right posed a dire threat to freedom and tolerance in the United States.
Each organization was able to use this local dispute to promote its own
larger interests far beyond Gaston County. Neither organization conceded
rhetorical space or was willing to consider any compromise. A substantive

debate about the merits of the reform proposal never occurred, and in the
end, all reform efforts were scuttled, the remaining grant funds were for­
feited, the school superintendent was forced to resign, and a community
was divided. And still, in the end, it was the children of Gaston County
who paid the highest price.

29

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER

Concluding Observations

The culture war does not manifest itself at all times in all places in the
same way. It is episodic and, very often, local in its expressions. Examples
abound: the dispute over the fate ofTerri Schiavo in Pinellas Park, Florida;
the conflict over teaching “intelligent design” in Kansas City; the contro­

versy over a teacher in the Bronx who was suspended for bringing bibles to
P.S. 5; a clash over a Civil War statue in Richmond, Virginia; the tempest
over a priest in St. Paul who refused to serve communion to gays at Mass;
the fury of parents in Mustang, Oklahoma, after the superintendent
excised a nativity scene at the end of the annual Christmas play; the dis­
pute over speech codes at the University of Pennsylvania; the row over
release time for religious instruction in the public schools in Staunton, Vir­
ginia; and on it goes.

Yet because what is under dispute and what is at stake is culture at its
deepest levels, carried by organizations relating to larger movements,
these local, often disparate conflicts are played out repeatedly in pre­
dictable ways. The nation was not divided by the Odyssey Program, but
the community of Gaston County, North Carolina, was for a time and
profoundly, with serious consequences. So have been and are communi­

ties and regions all over the nation whenever an event fraught with moral
meaning and cultural significance occurs that compels communities to

take positions and make decisions.
Are local and national elites and the organizations they represent polit­

ically significant? They certainly were in this instance, and as it has be­
come clear over the years, they are in virtually every other instance of cul­
tural conflict as well. It is in their interest to frame issues in stark terms,
to take uncompromising positions, and to delegitimate their opponents.
Clearly, entire populations are not divided at anywhere near the level of
intensity of the activists and the rhetoric, but because issues are often

framed in such stark terms, public choices are forced. In such circum­
stances even communities and populations that would prefer other
options, and much greater reason and harmony in the process, find them­
selves divided.

T here is nothing really new here. It would, in fact, seem to be the pat­
tern with social conflict generally, not least when it becomes violent.

30

The Enduring Culture War
1

‘Total war” is a recent, and relatively rare, phenomenon. Throughout
most of human history, war has been a minority affair, involving fractions
of the warring peoples’ populations and, if only by default, the residents
of the regions where the battles were actually joined. The idea that wars
(even civil wars) should mobilize entire peoples in support of the war
efforts is a distinctively modern orientation.43 And while the two great
examples of this kind of war play strongly upon our imaginations, in the
last analysis, even they must be reckoned as exceptional. To the extent
that such conflicts do demand more “democratic” participation, our

national war efforts are frequently geared toward mobilizing the ambiva­
lent masses. Historically, and even in the present, many of our wars still
take place at a remove from the citizens of the warring nations. In the
early twentieth century, for example, a mere 5,000 dedicated volunteers
fought against the army of the United Kingdom for the independence of
the Republic of lreland.44 T he same dynamic of relatively small cores
with larger, potentially polarized and mobilized peripheries can be found
in the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the Maoist Revolution in the
1940s. In R wanda it was the extremist elements of the ruling govern­
ment and armed forces and the extremist militia who organized the mas­
sacre of somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the population in
1994.45 In the case of the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Israel and
Palestine, it is only a minority at the i deological extremes who are
involved in perpetuating the conflict. Indeed, polls show that more than
eight out of ten Israelis and eight of ten Palestinians support reconcilia­
tion, as a general concept.46 Needless to say, the opinion of this majority
is not reflected in the continued presence of conflict in that area. In this
light, it seems hasty to dismiss all talk of a culture war just because the
combatants are small as a percentage of the whole. Indeed, would the
critics have argued that there was no politically consequential conflict
over civil rights or the war in Viemam because the majority of Americans
took middling positions?

To be sure, elites, activists, the institutions they lead and grassroots
support they mobilize, and the larger publics that form their natural con­
stituencies are enormously consequential. Yet their importance is not just

measured by the power to frame issues. It is also inversely measured by the
lack of influence of the majority of Americans, who are in the middle, to

31

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER

contradict this framing and offer an alternative. If the culture war is a
myth and the real story is about the consensus that exists in “the middle,”
then why is it that the middle cannot put for ward, much less elect, a
moderate who represents that consensus, with all of its complexity and
ambivalence on so many issues? If the center is so vital, then why is it

that the extremes are overrepresented in the structures of power-not
least, political power? In the case of the dispute over educational reform
in Gaston County, where was that contented middle-that consensus
that critics suggest is so broad and dynamic? In this dispute and in oth­
ers like it, the middle was there, hut as the outcome showed, it was also,
sadly, inconsequential.

This, it would seem, helps to explain some of the dynamics at work in
the 2004 national election and, indeed, the three or four elections imme­
diately preceding it. Data collected by the Pew Research Center indicate
that among white Americans, religio-cultural factors have become among
the most important in determining voting preferences in national elec­
tions.47 As the 2004 election demonstrated, Americans who are religiously
orthodox and who attend worship services regularly increasingly vote
Republican and take conservative stands on the range of cultural policy
issues. Conversely, those who are more secular and less connected to reli­

gious institutions increasingly vote Democratic and take liberal positions
on these same policy issues. Further analysis affirmed a central argument
of the original culture wars hypothesis, though now for average citizens:

The important political fault lines in the American religious land­
scape do not run along denominational lines, but cut across them.

That is, they are defined by religious outlook rather than denomi­
national labels …. The survey also found that traditionalists in all
three major faith groups overwhelmingly identify with the Repub­
lican Party—–and that traditionalist Evangelicals do so by a 70 per­
cent to 20 percent margin. The margins among Mainline Protestant
and Catholic traditionalists are less lopsided hut nonetheless solidly
Republican. On the other side of the divide, modernists in all these
religious traditions as well as secularists strongly favor the Demo­
crats. Modernist Mainline Protestants, for example, now favor the

h h
. • Democrats y a more t an two-to-one margm.

32

The Enduring Culture War

Needless to say, the majority of Americans were not self-conscious par­
tisans actively committed to one side or the other but rather constituted a
soft middle that tended one way or inclined toward the other. But the
options they ended up with were framed by elites in the parties and spe­
cial interest organizations, their respective institutions, and the rank-and­

file supporters who formed the grassroots support. So, too, were the nar­
ratives that contextualized and the arguments that legitimated those
choices. Thus, when push came to shove, Americans-even in the mid­

dle-made a choice.

Theoretical Reflections on Cultural Conflict

Given their conceptual and methodological starting point, it is not at all
surprising that the critics of the culture wars hypothesis focus on collec­
tive psychology and the general agreements one can find there. Yet there

are theoretical grounds for questioning the narrative of consensus just on
the face ofit. Put differently, there are good theoretical reasons for assum­
ing just the opposite of consensus-to begin with, the presumption of
cultural tension and conflict.

For one, social scientists know that culture is made up of various sys­
tems of actors and institutions competing in fields of social life for posi­
tion, resources, and symbolic capital. This means that culture is, by its
very constitution in social life, contested. In a society as pluralistic as ours,

the tendencies toward cultural conflict are inevitably intensified because
the diversity of actors and institutions in competition has increased. Con­
sciously or not, various actors within our public culture employ strategies
and tactics to preserve or expand their ability to shape their field of influ­
ence. As always, the stakes are not, at least first, material but rather sym­
bolic: the power of culture is the power to name things, to define reality,
to create and shape worlds of meaning. At its most extensive reach, it is
the power to project one’s vision of the world as the dominant, if not the
only legitimate, vision of the world, such that it becomes unquestioned.49

And yet the conflictual nature of culture is apparent in an even more
basic way than competition over the institutional means of worldmaking. It
is a commonplace of structural semiotics that our experience of the world is
made meaningful through comparisons and oppositions.50 A concept, an

33

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER

idea, a proposition, an object, an action, a group, a movement-these by
themselves are not inherently meaningful but rather take on significance in
relation to their opposite, something other, or in some cases, simply their
absence. The meaning of the world, then, takes shape for us within these
multiple and wide-ranging oppositions, in relation to the differences we
perceive. Light becomes meaningful in relation to dark or haziness; liberty
takes on significance in relation to oppression, coercion, or control; abun­
dance makes sense in relation to scarcity, and so on. Our understanding of
the world is framed and illuminated by these comparisons. So it is in social
life with the formation of collective identity. The self-understanding of a
society or a social group is, by the very nature of things, formed dialectically
in distinction to other societies or social groups. Collective identity becomes
crystallized most sharply, then, in relation to others who are different. The
various means of social control (for example, through punishment, litiga­
tion, ostracism, opprobrium, name-calling, and the like) highlight these dif­
ferences and are, in fact, ways in which social groups assert their own col­
lective identity, establish and reestablish their moral authority, reinforce the
group’s solidarity, and maintain boundaries between insiders and outsiders.
This dynamic is a fundamental feature of social life at all levels of complex­
ity or simplicity: Without such boundary work, a social group, a community,
a society faces what may be an even greater danger–its own internal moral
disintegration.

And thus culture is, by its very nature, contested-always and every­
where, even when it appears most homogeneous. As Philip Rieff has put
it, “Where there is culture, there is struggle”; it is “the form of fighting
before the fighting begins.”” This is so even if it is not always reflected in
public opinion. And when there is real war, culture is the centermost part
of the war itself. It is so because culture provides the terms by which col­
lectivities seek their own survival and the annihilation of the other. Oppo­
sitions are totalized and militarized.

Liberalism and Difference

Is there a politically significant normative conflict in contemporary
America? Indeed there is. And the only way to conclude that there is no
such normative conflict is to reject all but the most limited and superficial

34

The Enduring Culture War

conceptualization of culture, disregard massive amounts of evidence (even
from survey research), and take little to no account of directions suggested
by social theory. Does it amount to something justifying the term “culture
war?”This phrase is a metaphor, and the appropriateness of any metaphor
is measured by how well it fits the subject it describes. To those engaged
in this conflict-the activists who are involved in the divisions and the cit­
izens who get caught up in its logic-this is just the right metaphor.
Repeatedly one will hear people say that “war” is exactly what it feels like.

Beyond the significant conceptual issues, the methodological differences,
the existence of abundant multidimensional evidence to the contrary and

‘ ‘

not least, the fundamental challenge of social theory, there is something
curious about the cumulative argument against politically significant nor­
mative conflict. There was, of course, a time when the social sciences were
far more attentive to questions of conflict-indeed, when conflict was at the
heart of social theory and analysis. Such tendencies are nowhere to be found
among the critics of the culture wars. What accounts for the absence of
curiosity or even openness to the possibility that this conflict exists and
might mean something? The unwillingness to consider well-established
conceptual, methodological, and theoretical traditions as ways of approach­
ing normative conflict creates an impression of a profession settled in its
ways, comfortable with its predispositions and prejudices, and, perhaps, a
bit too defensive. To say that the larger story is really one of consensus is to
say, in effect, that all is well; there is nothing to be concerned with in these
matters. In its net political effect, this kind of social science looks very much
like the establishment and consensus-oriented structural functionalism of
the mid-twentieth century. Strange as this seems, this similarity is a minor
curiosity compared to its larger significance.

Intended or not, in its net effect, this narrative of consensus also entails
a denial of difference. The subtext of this narrative is that if there is no
politically or historically significant normative conflict, then there are no
differences that need to be accounted for or made sense of or addressed.
One need not take seriously the claims or grievances of the other. In this
case, the denial of difference is a denial of the particularities in social
ontologies that define these normative communities. The ideals, practices,
and sources of moral authority that constitute collective identity and sol­
idarity are simply ignored. In social life these are by no means the only

35

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER

differences among groups, communities, and societies, but they are, per­
haps, the deepest differences-differences that often enough engender
hatred and hostility. For the social sciences, this is not merely a lapse but
a missed opportunity. Indeed, on the international scene, we in America
and the West are paying a price for our longstanding blindness to these
deep normative differences.

There is an issue closer to home as well. Liberalism is, among other
things, an attempt to find a way to live together. As a political culture, lib­
eralism not only allows but also protects diversity in its fullest possible
scope. However, a denial of deep difference makes us inattentive to im­

portant developments in the social order that, whether people like it or
not, are challenging anew the ideals and institutions ofliberalism. This,
too, may be at our peril.

Notes

1. Robert Wuthnow’s explanation for this is rooted in the expansion of higher
education. Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton
University Press, 1988).

2. Steven Brint, “W hat If They Gave a War .. .?” Contemporary Sociology 21,
no. 4 (1992): 438-40.

3. Christian Smith and others, “The Myth of Culture Wars,” Culture: Newsletter
of the Sociology oJCulture,American Sociological Association 11, no. 1 (1996): 1, 7-10.

4. Paul DiMaggio, John Evans, and Bethany Bryson, “Have Americans’ Social
Attitudes Become More Polarized?” American journal efSociology 102, no. 3 (1996):
690-755.

5. Nancy Davis and Robert V. Robinson “Are the Rumors of War Exaggerated?
Religious Orthodoxy and Moral Progressivism in America,” American Journal of
Sociology 102, no. 3 (1996): 756-87.

6. Nancy Davis and Robert V. Robinson. “Religious Or thodoxy in American
Society: The Myth of a Monolithic Camp,” Journal for the Scientific Study ‘![Religion
35, no. 3 (1996): 229-45.

7. Randall Balmer, “Culture Wars: Views from the Ivory Tower,” Evangelical
Studies Bulletin 10, no.1 (1993): 1-2.

8.Jeremy Rabkin, “The Culture War That Isrit,” Policy Review, no. 96 (1999):
3-19.

9. Alan Wolfe, One Natirm, After AIL· What Middle Class Americam Really Think
about God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the
Right, the Left, and Each Other (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998), pp. 320-21.

The Enduring Culture War

10. Wayne Baker, America’s Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception (Princeton
University Press, 2005), p. 109.

11. Morris Fiorina, “What Culture War?” Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2004,
p. A14. See also Morris Fiorina, Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture
War? The Myth o/ a Polarized America (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005).

12. Wolfe, One Nation, p. 286.
13. Here I speak of the influence of Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Louis

Althusser, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, Jiirgen Habermas, and Niklas Luh­
mann, among others. For a summary of these shifts in the study of culture, see
Robert Wuthnow and others, Cultural Analysis: The Work o/ Peter Berger, Mary Dou­
glas, Michel Foucault, and Jurgen Habermas (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1984). See also Robert Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cul­
tural Analysis (University of California Press, 1987).

14. DiMaggio, Evans, and Bryson, “Americans’ Social Attitudes,” p. 738.
15. Davis and Robinson, “Rumors of War,” p. 780.
16. Yonghe Yang, “The Structure and D ynamics of Ideological Pluralism in

American Religion,” University of Massachusetts, 1996. For a revised excerpt, see
Yonghe Yang and Nicholas J. Demerath III, “What American Culture War? A
View from the Trenches as Opposed to the Command Posts and the Press Corps,”
in Civil Wars in American Politics, edited by Rhys Williams (New York: Aldine de
Gruyter, 1997).

17. Wolfe, One Nation.
18. Smith and others, “Myth of Culture Wars.”
19. See Baker,Amer£ca’s Crisis of Values; Fiorina, “W hat Culture War?”
20. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define Amen”ca (New

York: Basic Books, 1991), pp. 290-91; James Davison Hunter, Befure the Shooting
Begins: Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture War (New York: Free Press,
1994), pp. vii-viii.

21. For example, DiMaggio, Evans, and Bryson targeted the rhetoric of then­
Senator W arren Rudman, Wolfe pointed to the arguments of Irving Kristol, and
Smith and colleagues admitted that they were most concerned with countering
“popular conceptions” of the culture war. See DiMaggio, Evans, and Bryson,
”Americans’ Social Attitudes”; Wolfe, One Nation; and Smith and others, “Myth of
Culture Wars.”

22. Hunter, Culture Wars, pp. 159-61.
23. See Hunter, Before the Shooting Begim.
24. Unless otherwise indicated, assertions and quotes in· the rest of this and the

following section are from James Davison Hunter and Carl F. Bowman, The State
a/Disunion: The 1996 Survey o/ American Political Culture, Summary Report (Char­
lottesville, Va.: Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, 1996). The survey was
fielded by the Gallup Organization. The sample consisted of 2,047 respondents
representative of the noninstitutionalized population of the continental United

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER

States, age eighteen years and older. It was gathered via stratified, multistage prob­
ability sampling of households and weighted to ensure representativeness on key
demographic characteristics (race, gender, region, age, and education). The inter­
views were conducted in person and lasted about one and a half hours on average.

25. Ibid., p. 81.
26. The first index, license versus restraint, measured assent to these culrural

adages: “Live for today,” “Good fences make good neighbors,” “Look out for num­

ber one,” “Money is the key to life’s satisfactions,” and “Eat, drink, and be merry.”

The second, defined as relativism versus absolutism, measured acquiescence to such

statements as “Everything is beautiful-it’s all a matter of how you look at it,” “The

greatest moral virtue is to be honest about your feelings and desires,” and “All views

of what is good are equally valid.” Relativism scores were then discounted for those

who agreed that “Those who violate God’s rules will be punished,” “It is my respon­

sibility to help others lead more moral lives,” and
1’We would all be better off if we

could live by the same basic moral guidelines.” The third index, traditional versus

progressive morality, measured the degree of each respondent’s moral opposition to

divorce, premarital sex, sexual relations between two adults of the same sex, inter­

racial marriage, alcohol, smoking cigarettes, smoking marijuana, watching porno­

graphic films, and swearing or using offensive language.

27. The most conservative individuals belong to an average of 5 .29 associations,

and the most progressive belong to an average of 4.09 associations. The average for

those in the middle was 3.53 associations.
28. Hunter and Bowman, State of Disunion, pp. 55, 80, 83-95.
29. As we noted, both extremes share an “exceptionalist” view of American his­

tory and purpose. Yet they part company in dramatic ways in how they interpret
this: the Christian right operates with a strong, providentialist view of history and
purpose that progressive social elites just as strongly reject.

30. Hunter and Bowman, State of Disunion, pp. 6o-62, and James D. Hunter
and Daniel Johnson, “Establishment Sociology and the Culture Wars Hypothesis,”
unpublished working paper.

31. Ibid., pp. 60-63. John Evans updated the DiMaggio study using 2000 data
and found that political partisans in the general population were even more divided
than ever. Cited in Jonathan Rauch, “Bipolar Disorder,” Atlantic Monthly, January­
February 2005, p. 104.

32. Traditionalists and neotraditionalists constituted 11 and 16 percent of the
population, respectively.

33. We compared the groups according to political self-identification (Hunter
and Bowman, State of Disunion, p. 89) and on a range of specific issues relating to
gay rights (Ibid., p. 93). See also Alan Abraruowitz and Kyle Saunders, “W hy Can’t
We All Just Get Along? The Reality of a Polarized America,” Forum 3, no. 2
(2005): ar ticle 1 (www.bepress.com/ forumlvol3/iss2/artl [September 2005]).
Their evidence indicates that “there are deep divisions in America between Demo-

38

The Enduring Culture War

crats and Republicans … and between religious voters and secular voters. These
divisions are not confined to a small minority of elected officials and activists-they
involve a large segment of the public, and they are likely to increase in the future as
a result of long-term trends affecting American society.”

34. Hunter, Culture Wars; Brint “W hat If They Gave a War,” p. 440.
35. Wolfe, One Nation.
36. Fiorina, Abrams, and Pope, Culture War?p. 105.
37. Smith and others, “Myth of Culture Wars,” p.10.
38. See Stephen Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 2d ed. (London: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2005).
39. See David A. Snow and Robert Benford. “Ideology, Frame Resonance, and

Participant Mobilization,” International Social Movement Research 1 (1988):
197-217, and David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford, “Master Frames and Cycles
of Protest,” in Frontiers in Social Movement Theory, edited by Aldon D. Morris and
Carol M. Mueller (Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 133-55. This is the first reason
why the vast majority of Americans who are somewhere in the middle of these
debates are not heard. They have no access to the tools of public culture in the way
elites do.

40. This account is fully described in Kirnon Sargeant and Edwin L. West Jr.,
“Teachers and Preachers: The Battle over Public School Reform in Gaston County,
North Carolina,” in The American Culture Wars, edited by James Nolan (University
of Virginia Press, 1996), pp. 35-59.

41. Ibid., p. 42.
42. Ibid., p. 41.
43. Maurice Pearton, Diplomacy, War and Technology since 1830 (University Press

of Kansas, 1984).
44. See Peter Hart, “The Social Structure of the Irish Republican Army

1916-1923,” Historical journal 42, no. 1 (1999): 207-31. Atthe height of the fight­
ing-between 1916 and 1923-there were up to 100,000 individuals in the Irish
Republican Army, but for the majority of the conflict, there were 5,000 volunteers
who were considered “reliable” and “active” (p. 209), and these were “dispropor­
tionately skilled, trained, and urban.”

45. Extremists in the military and government bitterly opposed the Arusha
Accord, a power-sharing treaty for warring factions in Rwanda, and were the likely
culprits in the assassination of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana on April
6, 1994. “Within an hour of the plane crash, the Presidential Guard, elements of
the Rwandan armed forces (FAR) and extremist militia (Interahamwe and Impuza­
mugambi) set up roadblocks and barricades and began the organized slaughter,
starting in the capital Kigali, of nearly one million Rwandans in 100 days’ time.
Their first targets were those most likely to resist the plan of genocide: the opposi­
tion Prime Minister, the president of the constitutional court, priests, leaders of the
Liberal Party and Social Democratic Party, the Information Minister, and tellingly,

39

JAMES DAVISON HUNTER

the negotiator of the Arusha Accord.” William Ferroggiaro, ed., “The U.S. and the
Genocide in Rwanda 1994: Evidence of Inaction,” National Security Archive,
August 20, 2001 (www.gwu.edu/-nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB53/).

46. “General support for reconciliation among Israelis has also increased and
stands now at 84 percent compared to 80 percent in June 2004. Eighty-one percent
of the Palestinians support reconciliation today compared to 67 percent last June.
More important, however, is the consistent across the board increase in support for
a list of specific reconciliation steps, varying in the level of commitment they pose
to both publics.” Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, ”Joint Israeli­
Palestinian Public Opinion Poll, March 2005: Summary of Results,” March 16,
2005 (www.pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2005/p15ejoint.htm1).

47. Pew Research Center, Trends 2005 (Washington: 2005). See also John C.
Green and others, “The A merican Religious Landscape and the 2004 Presidential
Vote: Increased Polarization/ Survey report (Washington: Pew Forum on Religion
and Public Life, February 3, 2005).

48. Pew Research Center, Trends 2005, p. 28. This statement mirrored one made
thirteen years earlier in Hunter, Culture Wars.

49. Lukes, Power.
50. I do not at all subscribe to orthodox structuralist assumptions about duality

but fully recognize that objects may have multiple meanings and interpretations de­
pending upon circumstances. See the critique of Claude Levi-Strauss in Mary
Douglas, “The Meaning of Myth, with Special Reference to ‘La Geste d’Asdiwal,”‘
in The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism, edit ed by Edmund Leach (London:
Tavistock), pp. 49-70.

51. Phillip Rieff, Sacred Order/Social Order, vol. 1: My Life among the Deathworks
(University of Virginia Press, 2006).

40

THE CULTURE WAR THAT

NEVER CAME

ALAN WOLFE

EvERYfHING WAS ALL SET. An important assistant to a Republican senator
had written the memo demonstrating the benefits his party would receive
by taking immediate action. His party’s leaders in Congress started draft­
ing legislation and writing their speeches while the Republican president,
a man well known for his determination to stay on course, changed his

travel plans to fly to Washington at short notice from his Texas ranch.
Democrats, meanwhile, struck dumb by the unfolding events, had noth­
ing to say, fearing, once again, that anything they did say would confirm
their reputation as liberal elitists insufficiently respectful of the culture of
life. Terri Schiavo, a woman who had been kept alive on a feeding tube for
fifteen years after her husband and parents disagreed on what her inten­
tions had been, was all set to be one more campaign in the American cul­
ture war.

And then, nothing happened-or at least nothing along the lines that
nearly all pundits in the United States anticipated. Public opinion polls
quickly showed that most Americans, by a 63 to 28 percent margin, sup­
ported the removal ofTerri Schiavo’s feeding tube; that even Republicans
were inclined to think along these lines; and that by a 25 percent margin,
Americans opposed the decision by Congress and the president to pass
and sign a law requiring that the details of one family’s tragic situation be
once again reviewed by the courts.’ Although demonstrators continued
their vigil outside the hospice where Schiavo lay in her bed, their numbers
were small-smaller, sometimes, than the number of journalists covering

41

AWarforthe

Soul of America

A History of the Culture Wars

ANDREW HARTMAN

The University of Chicago Press CHICAGO AND LONDON

3

Taking God’s
Country Back

In an influential 1976 essay, “What Is a Neoconservative? ,” Irving Kris­
tal wrote that he and his fellow neoconservatives tended “to be re­
spectful of traditional values and institutions,” religion being perhaps
the most important such traditional institution. Yet Kristal was not
very religious himself. As it was for other New York intellectuals, even
most neoconservatives, Judaism was more about his cultural identity
than about his religious affiliation. Nevertheless, he valued religion as
foundational to representative democracy, believing it helped curb
the unmoored urges of people left to their own devices. “The indi­
vidual who is abruptly ‘liberated’ from the sovereignty of traditional
values will soon find himself experiencing the vertigo and despair of
nihilism.” These feelings, Kristal warned, were what tempted people
to submit to authoritarian rule.1

In this elocution, neoconservatives helped articulate yet another
conservative paradigm for understanding the dangers presented by
cultural radicalism, endowing conservative America with a powerful
rhetorical weapon to fight the culture wars. And yet it is doubtful that
neoconservatives entirely grasped the full extent of “the vertigo and
despair” that millions of Christian Americans felt living in post-sixties
America. This was particularly true of white evangelicals, whose inter­
pretations of the sixties cultural revolutions grafted onto older under­
standings about the grave dangers posed by modernity.

Thanks to several Great Awakenings since the colonial era, the
United States has long been home to the world’s largest population of

evangelical Christians, Protestants who pay less attention to liturgy
than to personal conversion and piety and who believe entry to God’s

Taking God’s Country Back 71

kingdom requires that they spread his word on earth. That evangeli­
cals have tended to mix their religious and national identities has long
tinged the rhetoric of American cultural politics with an eschatologi­
cal hue. This became increasingly so in the twentieth century as more
and more religious Americans felt scarred by the acids of modernity,
which burned gaping, irreparable holes in the fabric of Christian
America. For them the culture wars, more than a battle over national
identity, have served as a struggle for the soul of America, a clash over
what it means to live in a world in which all foundations had been
pulled out from under, a world in which, at its starkest, “God is dead.”2

Even devout evangelicals-devout evangelicals especially-had to
act upon the implications of modernity. In pushing back against mod­
ernist forms of knowledge that fanned the flames of religious skep­
ticism, such as biblical criticism and Darwinism, early-twentieth­
century conservative evangelicals-many of whom, by the 1920s,
accentuated biblical inerrancy and began referring to themselves as
“fundamentalists” -successfully enacted laws that mandated reading
the King James Bible in schools and outlawed the teaching of evolu­
tion. Such activism sprang from a desire to reassert religious control
over a society that was becoming increasingly modern and secular.3

By the 1970s, conservative white evangelicals were confronted with
a perfect storm of secular power that they deemed a threat to their
way of life and to the Christian nation they believed the United States
once was and ought to be again. This realization, more than anything
else, led religious conservatives to take up arms in the culture wars.
Worldly activism became more imperative, so much so that conser­
vative evangelicals formed an uneasy political alliance with conserva­
tive Americans from different theological backgrounds. Even funda­
mentalists, whose insistence upon correct doctrine meant that minor
differences in biblical interpretation often led to major schisms, reluc­
tantly joined forces with conservative Catholics, Jews, and Mormons.
This was all the more remarkable given that many fundamentalists
viewed the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, as a sign that
the end times were fast approaching.4

The overarching issue for religious conservatives, and what brought
them together with their former adversaries, was the threat posed by
an increasingly secular state. School prayer, long practiced in most

American public schools, had been rendered unconstitutional by the
landmark 1962 Engel v. Vitale Supreme Court decision. In 1978, in

72

CHAPTER THREE

another example of how the secular state encroached upon Christian

America, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) implemented a federal

mandate requiring that Christian private schools comply with deseg­
regation practices or risk having their tax-exempt status revoked. The

Christian Right-as it came to be known by 1980, the year it helped

elect Ronald Reagan president, signaling its arrival as a powerful po­

litical alliance-worked from the assumption that an increasingly sec­

ular government represented the gravest threat to Christian values.

Part of this had to do with the conservative religious impression that

the government conspired against the traditional family unit. In an

earlier era, when W illiam Jennings Bryan’s biblically inspired popu­

lism appealed to millions of Americans, evangelicals had often mar­

ried their anxieties about the family to progressive economic concerns

about the destructive force of unregulated monopoly capitalism. But

by the 1970s, the traditionalist worldview of conservative Christians

and the antistatist premises that inspired more and more Americans

were no longer mutually exclusive ideological trajectories. As an in­

structive example, conservatives posited that government’s meddling
in the form of welfare policies weakened the traditional family struc­

ture. “Families are strong when they have a function to perform,” con­

servative activist Connie Marshner contended. “And the more gov­

ernment, combined with the helping professions establishment, take

away the functions families need to perform-to provide their health

care, their child care, their housing-the less purpose there is for a

family, per se, to exist.”5

By the same logic, the Christian Right focused on the role of public

education. State-run schools were thought to be the primary secular

institution geared to disrupt the inculcation of religious values that

had traditionally transpired in the family.

As long as there has been American public education, there has

been resistance to elements of it, hailing from a variety of different

forces all along the political and religious spectrums. Such resistance

took on mostly conservative overtones in the twentieth century, when

the national curriculum slowly but surely merged with the progres­

sive curriculum innovated by John Dewey and a cohort of prom­

inent pedagogues at Columbia University’s Teacher ‘s College. Pro­

gressive education was a secular movement that sought to distance

the national curriculum from the ecumenical Protestantism that had

Taking God’s Country Back

73

been its organizing force since Horace Mann’s common school move­

ment in the early nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, progressives

clashed with fundamentalists over an assortment of curricular items,

particularly over mandatory Bible reading and over whether to teach

Darwin’s evolutionary science or creationism . 1his collision famously

sparked the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, which

put fundamentalists on the map, often as a source of derision for more

cosmopolitan-minded Americans. H. L. Mencken’s acerbic commen­

tary on the trial painted a harsh picture of fundamentalists as rubes

who promoted the story of Genesis because it was “so simple that

even a yokel can grasp it.”6

By the end of the 1930s, to the dismay of conservatives, the pro­

gressive curriculum had become even more prevalent in many schools

across the country. Teacher ‘s College professor Harold Rugg’s popu­

lar textbooks Man and His Changing Society, which incorporated the
scholarship of progressive historian Charles Beard, who subjected

the American past to the paradigm of class conflict, were assigned to

more than five million students in five thousand school districts. But

conservative resistance to progressivism grew as well, made evident

by the successful movement in the early 1940s to remove Rugg’s text­

books from schools. By the early Cold War, conservative educational

vigilantism, abetted by McCarthyism, had turned back the tides of

the progressive curriculum across the nation. In the 1950s, as thou­

sands of progressive educators learned the hard way, mere mention

of Dewey was likened to summoning the ghost of Karl Marx. But de­

spite its reach, Cold War conservatism kept a lid on liberalizing cur­

ricular trends for only a short time. The cultural earthquakes of the

sixties shattered the short-lived antiprogressive consensus formed in

the early Cold War. By the 1970s, the Christian Right had valid reason

to believe that the nation’s public schools no longer represented their

moral vision.7

The Supreme Court enshrined secularism in the schools with a se­

ries of landmark cases, most famously the 1962 Engel v. Vitale ruling

that New York’s twenty-two-word school prayer violated the First

�endment’s Establishment Clause. In 1963 the court built an even

.higher wall of separation between church and state with its School

District of Abington Township v. Schempp decision in favor of Ellary

ldiempp, a Unitarian freethinker who challenged the constitutional-

L

74
CHAPTER THREE

ity of mandatory Bible reading in his high school. In polls taken since

the sixties, the school prayer and Bible-reading rulings have routinely

ranked as the most unpopular Supreme Court decisions, particularly

among conservative Christians, many of whom considered Engel and

Abington the beginning of American civilization’s downfall. Some

members of Congress received more letters about school prayer and

Bible reading than any other issues. Millions of Americans showed

their displeasure with the new law of the land by disobeying it, as
students in schools across the country, particularly in the South and

Midwest, persisted in their age-old practice of praying and reading

the Bible together. Those who disagreed with Engel and Abington con­

tended that it was undemocratic for the “philosopher-kings” on the

Supreme Court to overrule the majority of Americans who wanted

children to pray in school. Wtlliam Buckley Jr. gave voice to a grow­

ing conservative displeasure with the Supreme Court, which, due to

its “ideological fanaticism,” he argued, “is making it increasingly dif­

ficult for our society to breathe normally: to govern itself through es­

tablished tradition and authority; to rule by the local consensus; to

deal effectively with its domestic enemies; to carry forward its im­

plicit commitment to the faith of its fathers.”8

Post-sixties curriculum trends also distressed conservative Chris­

tians. In social studies classes, students were increasingly challenged to

clarify their own values, independent of those instilled by parents and

churches. In science, teachers slowly overcame the perpetual taboo

against teaching evolution. And in health classes, honest discussion
of sex came to replace moral exhortation. A popular anthropology

curriculum created for elementary students by psychologist Jerome

Bruner in the early 197os-MACOS, or Man: A Course of Study­

exemplified the secularization of the curriculum. During a MA COS

unit students examined the Netsilik Eskimo culture, including their

practice of killing the elderly, in order to understand and not judge

cultural differences. Such relativistic lesson plans became the norm.

In 1969 the National Education Association (NEA) advocated what

it called the “inquiry method” of instruction, a Socratic discussion

technique that would allow students “to view knowledge as tentative

rather than absolute” and thus “to see that value judgments cannot be

accepted solely on faith.” Opposing MACOS-style learning became a

rallying cry for Christian culture warriors. “Your tax dollars are being

Taking God’s Country Back 75

used,” Jesse Helms cautioned recipients of a 1976 fundraising letter,

“to pay for grade school courses that teach our children that canni­

balism, wife swapping, and the murder of infants and the elderly are

acceptable behavior.”9

Religious conservatives organized against these curriculum reform

efforts from the outset, particularly against sex education, which was

becoming an increasingly common feature of the national curriculum.

In 1963 Dr. Mary Calderone founded the Sex Information and Educa­

tion Council of the United States (SIECUS) on the premise that ob­

jective sex education was a more realistic means to suppress the sex­

ual revolution than chastisement. Many educators agreed with her,

including Sally Williams, a school nurse in Anaheim, California, who
created a popular sex education curriculum. Williams sought to direct

students away from premarital sex, but her curriculum described sex­

ual intercourse in relatively graphic fashion for students as young as

twelve and provided information to older students about birth con­
trol, in recognition that premarital sex was likely. Religious conserva­

tives, predictably moralist, opposed such an approach and in 1969, af­

ter gaining a majority on the Anaheim school board, promptly ended

the sex education program.10

Conservatives elsewhere replicated the efforts of Anaheim activ­

ists. Fundamentalist preacher Billy James Hatgis’s Christian Crusade

helped launch a national movement against sex education. Hargis’s

lieutenant Gordon Drake authored a pamphlet-“Is the Schoolhouse

the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?” -that purportedly sold ninety

thousand copies in three months. Hargis and Drake forever engraved

SIECUS, “the pornographic arm of liberal education,” as a subversive

group in the conservative lexicon, “all a part of a giant communist

conspiracy.” In his stock speech, Hargis claimed that sex education

was part of a larger plan hatched by progressive educators to “destroy

the traditional moral fiber of America and replace it with a pervasive

sickly humanism.” In a letter to Christian Crusaders, Hargis com­

plained about a sex education program in Jefferson County, Colorado,

where the principal “said that the concept of morality being taught in

his school to elementary grade children was quite different from that

of their parents and pastors, and the kids would have to decide which
was right.”11

In Kanawha County, West Virginia, violent protests erupted when

76 CHAPTER THREE

the school board sought to align with a 1970 state regulation mandat­
ing that all West Virginia students read texts reflecting the nation’s
multiethnic composition. Toe Kanawha textbook fight, described in
hyperbolic fashion as “the shot heard around the world,” influenced
the Christian Right’s approach to later curriculum battles. Alice
Moore, the wife of a local evangelical minister who was elected to the
Kanawha board in 1970 on a conservative platform that included an
anti-sex education plank, was the first to object to the proposed read­
ing list. Due to her tireless campaigning during the summer of 1974,
when the Kanawha schools opened that September at least 20 percent
of the student population stayed home. In sympathy, county coal min­
ers organized a wildcat strike. Violence marred the campaign: buses
were shot at, teachers were harassed, and a school district building
was firebombed. National right-wing groups descended upon West
Virginia to join the cause, including the John Birch Society and the Ku
Klux Klan, the latter of which held a notorious rally at the state capitol.
Behind the scenes, the newly formed Heritage Foundation, still a rel­
atively unknown right-wing think tank, offered free legal support to
protestors and organized a conference on the rights of parents. Con­
nie Marshner, the Heritage Foundation’s first director of education,
later maintained that the West Virginia story called attention to “the
textbook problem across the country ” and helped inform the Chris­
tian Right during its later culture war struggles.12

Not surprisingly, racial anxieties factored into the Kanawha text­
book battle. Local conservatives seemed horrified that Eldridge Cleav­
er’s Soul on Ice, depicted as “anti-white racism, ” appeared on the read­
ing list. However, such racial concerns often mixed with religious and
moral panic. Toe inclusion of The Autobiography of Malcolm X on the
approved list seemingly offended Alice Moore not because ofits frank
discussion of white supremacy but rather due to Malcolm’s giving “all
praise to Allah” that he was no longer a “brainwashed Christian.” Jack
Maurice, editor of the local newspaper, attributed the controversy to
the “renewal of the theological dispute … pitting the Fundamental­
ists against the Modernists … the Literalists in their interpretation of
scripture, against the Symbolists.” As opposed to traditionalism, the
modernist educators glorified, in Moore’s words, “self-actualization, ”
“clarification of their own values,” and the dangerous idea that “truth
is whatever is truth to that individual.” For the Kanawha conserva­
tives, such relativism was a slippery slope to a host of dangerous anti-

Taking God’s Country Back 77

Christian ideologies. As one parent remembered: “They were teach­
ing my kids socialism, homosexuality, and situational ethics.”13

Toe NEA sent a panel of educators to Kanawha County in Decem­
ber 1974 to hold hearings on the nature and scope of the protests.
Toe panel issued a final report recognizing that religious differences
moved the protestors to action. “For generations, a fundamentalist
religious belief has given meaning to the mountain way of life and has
given the mountain people the strength to withstand its hardships.”
This echoed how a national correspondent described the protests: as
“a full-scale eruption of frustrations against a worldly culture imposed
on an area literally a world apart from the rest of the country.” Though
correct about opposition to cosmopolitan ideas, the condescending
notion that such anger was isolated to a rural backwater failed to cap­
ture the growing national dissatisfaction with the increasingly secular
features of public education in the United States.14

The movement against the secular curriculum was part and parcel
of the rising Christian Right, in part because it blended so easily with
the politics of “family values,” a new umbrella referent for concerns
about feminism, abortion, divorce, premarital sex, and gay rights. Mel
and Norma Gabler, devout Southern Baptists who converted their
small-town Texas home into a national center for exposing liberal
bias in the nation’s textbooks, said that their main concern was that
textbooks were “destroying the family” by means of so-called values
clarification. Interviewed about the West Virginia textbook brouhaha,
Mel Gabler said: “What really bugged me was that textbooks seem to
divide the children from their parents, especially the social studies
which appear to teach the child a philosophy alien to the parents.”
Such pedagogy violated the biblical mandate that parents raise their
children to be Christians. “Considering Ephesians 6:4, which tells us
to bring up our children ‘in the nurture and admonition of the Lord,'”
they asked, “can we as Christian parents entrust the education of our
children to current textbooks?” The Gablers became enormously in­
fluential. This owed in part to the fact that they lived in Texas, where
citizens were automatically granted a hearing before the state board of
education. As the Gablers became trusted fixtures at board meetings,
publishers were forced to tailor books to pass muster with them. And

�ince Texas was one of the nation’s largest textbook purchasers, giving
1t the power to dictate to the national textbook market, the Gablers’

eological inspections had far-reaching implications. Yet their influ-

78 CHAPTER THREE

ence resulted from more than mere coincidence of geography. Their
message was convincing. And they were far from alone in their holy
war against secular schools.15

Some of the most influential evangelical writers of the 1970s, m-
cluding Francis Schaeffer and Tim LaHay e, placed education at the
center of their plans to redeem American culture. They contended
that the schools had been taken over by an elite who sought to spread
an anti-Christian ideology they termed “secular humanism:’ In the
religious conservative imagination, secular humanism_re_placed c�m­
munism as the alien ideology most threatening to Christian America.
Rousas John Rushdoony, an evangelical intellectual who founded the
somewhat theocratic Christian Reconstructionist movement, taught
conservatives that secular humanism rationalized a blasphemous cul­
ture because it was a hubristic philosophy of “man striving to be God.”
In this way, the critique of secular humanism allowed conservatives
to make sense of previously unimaginable cultural trends, such as the
teaching of sex in the public schools. Such manifestations of cultural
decadence were the logical consequences of a society’s abandonment
of long-standing traditions rooted in biblical tenets.16

Although Christian Right rhetoric about the dangers posed by sec­
ular humanism was overstated, the United States had indeed become
a more secular nation. Proof of this was not necessarily found in the
growing number of Americans who adhered to the cr�ed set for� in
the 1933 Humanist Manifesto: “that the nature of the uruverse depicted
by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic
guarantees of human values.” Yes, the number of secularists, natural­
ists, humanists, freethinkers, and atheists increased throughout the
twentieth century, owing much to the fact that universities, secular­
izing institutions par excel lence, bulked so large in the culture. But
the United States remained an extremely religious nation, particularly
relative to nations of comparable wealth. Gallup polls from the 1950s
through the end of the century showed that upwards of 90 percent of
Americans claimed to believe in God.17

Twentieth-century America became more secular due not to a
lapse in the number of religious people but rather �o a wan�g in �e
scope of religious authority. The most obvious engme of this decline
was the Supreme Court’s revolution in constitutional interpretation,,
which radically redrew the boundaries between church and state. In
its 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township, the

Taking God’s Country Back
79

court applied the First Amendment’s establishment clause to the
states. This reinterpretation of incorporation then led to a series of
cases that strengthened individual rights relative to religious or moral
authority. All of a sudden, viewing obscene material in private was le­
gal, but organized prayer and Bible reading in school were not.18

The paradox of American secularization-the perplexing fact that
religious authority dwindled even as the vast majority of Americans
doggedly persisted in religious belief-helps explain the culture wars.
White Protestant moral authority, which extended beyond the reli­
gious sphere for most of American history, had been put on the de­
fensive. Conservative Christians, formerly part of the establishment,
had come to see themselves as cultural counterrevolutionaries. Fore­
grounding such a counterrevolution was the fact that for many con­
servatives, particularly white evangelicals, religion expressed a larger
national identity. Christianity was crucial to a normative framework
of Americanism. One of the primary aspirations of the Christian Right
was to reestablish, in the words of philosopher Charles Tay lor, an “un­
derstanding that used to define the nation, where being American
would once more have a connection with theism, with being ‘one na­
tion under God,’ or at least with the ethic which was interwoven with
this.” But as Tay lor also posits, “the very embattled nature of these at­
tempts shows how we have slid out of the old dispensation.” In other
words, the Christian Right’s emergence was predicated on a secular
shift. Its efforts to return the sacred to the realm of national politics
were in symbiosis with secularization.19

Despite the interdependent relationship between secularization
and the growth of the Religious Right, the culture wars were not only a
battle between religious and secular Americans; they were also an in­
ternal feature of American Protestantism. Some Protestant thinkers,
especially mainline Protestants, who tended to be more liberal than
their evangelical counterparts in both theology and politics, sought to
radically adjust their doctrines to the eartli-shattering epistemologi­
cal implications of modernity. Conservative evangelicals, in contrast,
�sponded to the challenges of modernity with doctrinal and political
reaction. This intra-Protestant struggle played out at the 1979 Southern
Baptist Convention (SBC), where conservatives who felt threatened
by modern sexual mores-feminism, abortion, and gay rights-took
�ontrol of the SBC, to the dismay of their more moderate coreligion­
ists. Conservatives elected as their new president Adrian Rogers, a

Bo CHAPTER THREE

Memphis pastor whose platform urged that the SBC return to the prin­
ciples of “conservative, Bible-believing congregations … that believe
in the inerrant, infallible word of God.” Given that the SBC was the na­
tion’s largest Protestant denomination, the Christian Right’s political
fortunes grew rosier after the SBC’s 1979 political jump to the right.20

That evangelicals resisted some of the implications of modernity
is not to say that they did not find ways to accommodate moder­
nity, with the qualification that accommodation did not entail agree­
ment or, much less, wholesale adoption. The influence of evangelical
thinker Francis Schaeffer demonstrated that conservative Protestant­
ism found ways to adjust to secular modernity and that the Christian
Right was both reactionary and often innovative. Schaeffer furnished
evangelical Christianity-despite the notorious fundamentalist insis­
tence upon doctrinal purity-with an ecumenical spirit, at least in
its willingness to form political alliances with nonevangelical conser­
vatives. Such an ecumenical disposition was crucial to the Christian
Right culture wars. “It is little exaggeration,” James Sire writes, with
just a touch of exaggeration, “to say that if Schaeffer had not lived,
historians of the future looking back on these decades would have to
invent him in order to explain what happened.”21

Schaeffer, the hippielike evangelical sage ofL’Abri, a Swiss moun­
tain retreat for Christian and non-Christian wanderers alike, became
famous in the 1970s, late in his life, when his books and documen­
tary films touched millions of American evangelicals. Growing up
in working-class Pennsylvania, Schaeffer had been “saved” at a tent
revival in 1929. His theology was shaped by the great debates of the
1920s, when his mentor J. Graham Machen was fired from Princeton
Theological Seminary for maintaining fundamentalist beliefs at a time
when liberal theologians-those who more actively reconciled their
faiths to modernist thought, including Darwinism-were on the rise.
Schaeffer attended Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadel­
phia, which Machen founded as a conservative alternative to the more
liberal divinity schools. He pastored a number of churches in the United
States before moving to Switzerland as a missionary in 194 7. After fun­
damentalist firebrand Carl McIntire astonishingly accused him of be­
ing a communist and fired him from the mission, Schaeffer and his
wife Edith founded L’Abri in 1955. Although charging Schaeffer with
communism was outrageous even by the standards of McIntire, living
in Europe had indeed led Schaeffer to reject the pietism of American

Taking God’s Country Back g1

evangelicalism and to embrace a more modern spiritualism, part and
parcel of his newfound interest in art, music, and philosophy.22

Edith Schaeffer, the child of Christian fundamentalist missionar­
ies, was also a persuasively modernist force in her husband’s life. Toe
product of a privileged upbringing in a mission in China, Edith pas­
sionately loved high culture. But she was not always happy about the
tension inherent to being both a cultural highbrow and a Christian
fundamentalist. Her son Franky remembers his mother’s defensive
objections to H. L. Mencken’s antifundamentalist caricatures: “We’re
not like that! He would never have written those horrible things if he
had ever met me!” Franky, who ultimately rejected his parents’ the­
ology, puts a somewhat different spin on their seemingly oxymoronic
combination of fundamentalism and high culture. “I think my father
lived with a tremendous tension,” he writes, “that pitted his grow­
ing interest in art, culture, music, and history against a stunted the­
ology frozen in the modernist-fundamentalist battles of his youthful
Christian experience.” Rather than stunting, however, this modernist­
fundamentalist tension lent great significance to Schaeffer’s role: he
helped American evangelicals reconcile their fundamentalist readings
of scripture to modernity, or at least modernity shorn of modernist
epistemologies. In order to do battle with modernity, Schaeffer’s the­
ology incorporated all that he had learned from modernist forms.
“Dad spent his life trying to somehow reconcile the angry theology
that typified movement-fundamentalism with a Christian apologetic
that was more attractive.”23

Schaeffer’s reckoning with the acids of modernity helped reshape
evangelical thought. Like early-twentieth-century evangelicals who
read Nietzsche in order to better relate their theology to modern
America, Schaeffer grappled with modernist giants in order to re­
invigorate fundamentalism. He also tangled with modish artists and
musicians. “In the early ‘6os,” his son bragged, “he was probably the
only fundamentalist who had even heard of Bob Dylan.” Schaeffer’s
method-what he called his “Christian apologetic,” a system of thought
for relating the meaning of modern cultural forms to scripture-thus
gave biblical inerrancy a wider currency by certifying it for a new
generation. Of course, being conversant in countercultural music
�d not necessarily translate into eschewing that old-time religion.

Like so many other evangelical thinkers during the 1970s, including
lantankerous would-be theocrats like Rushdoony, Schaeffer had an

82
CHAPTER THREE

overarching philosophical mission to demonstrate
the flaws in sec­

ular humanism, which he defined as “the system w
hereby men and

women, beginning absolutely by themselves, try rat
ionally to build

out from themselves, having only Man as their inte
gration point, to

find all knowledge, meaning and value.”
24

Schaeffer believed himself to be one of the only thinke
rs who truly

grasped the anxieties that modernity presented peop
le with. He theo­

rized that Western society, by adopting secular huma
nism as its orga­

nizing principle, had crossed a “line of despair.” Mod
ern people lived

in despair because they no longer knew truth; they w
ere mired in rel­

ativism. Prior to being pushed over this precipice, e
verybody, even

non-Christians, could make sense of truth claims.
“One could tell a

non-Christian to ‘be a good girl’ and, while she mig
ht not have fol­

lowed your advice, at least she would have understo
od what you were

talking about,” he reasoned. “To say the same thing to
a truly modern

girl today would be to make a ‘nonsense’ statement.
The blank look

you might receive would not mean that your standard
s had been re-

. gl “25
jected, but that your message was mearun ess.

Schaeffer contended that Western civilization had b
ecome post­

Christian in its rejection of antithesis, a method of th
ought based on

the proposition that since this is absolutely true, that is
absolutely un­

true. Schaeffer argued that Hegel represented the fi
rst step toward

the post-Christian line of despair because Hegel

the

orized that syn­

thesis, not antithesis, was the superior method of thou
ght . Synthesis,

in Schaeffer ‘s reading of Hegel, implied relativism, sin
ce all acts, all

gestures, had an equal claim to truth, in that the dial
ectical process

would eventually envelop everything. Napoleon’s conqu
est of Europe

was to be judged not by the brutality of its individual
acts but by the

synthesis of the “world spirit on horseback” that Hege
l famously be­

lieved Napoleon signified. Furthering his eclectic int
ellectual history

of modernity, informed by his unique Christian apologe
tic, Schaeffer

wrote that existentialism announced humanity’s nihilis
tic trek across

the line of despair. Sartre, Schaeffer posited, believed
there was no

way of knowing truth absolutely and that, given this, hu
man existence

was ridiculous. “Nevertheless, you try to authenticate
yourself by an

act of the will. It does not really matter in which direct
ion you act as

long as you act.” An individual could choose to eith
er help an elderly

woman walk across a street or attack her and steal her
purse; in ei­

ther act the person was “authenticated:’ Although this
critique of ex-

Taking God’s Country Back 83

istentialism ignored some of its key facets -namely, the unrelativistic
premise that an authenticating project was worthwhile only if it cre­
ated space for more people to experience freedom -by reading exis­
tentialism against the grain of scripture, Schaeffer appealed to some
of the young, modish Americans who voraciously read Sartre. Even­
tually, powerful Christian conservatives sought him out precisely be­
cause of this appeal.26

Although Schaeffer presented a softer side to fundamentalism, and
although he avoided politicizing his theology until he was pressed
into serving a growing conservative Christian movement in the 1970s,
his antithesis methodology had conservative political implications.
Schaeffer made clear, for instance, that he considered homosexual­
ity an expression of modern despair. “In much of modern thinking all
antithesis and all the order of God’s creation is to be fought against­
including the male-female distinctions.” And yet despite the anti­
homosexual connotations of his theology, his son Frank describes his
father as having been decidedly unprejudiced. “Dad thought it cruel
and stupid to believe that a homosexual could change by ‘accepting
Christ.”‘ Schaeffer thought homosexuality was a sin, of course, but
a sin on par with other, less politicized sins, such as gluttony. He be­
lieved all sins could be forgiven and all sinners treated with kindness. 27

Although such parsing offered little comfort to most gays and les­
bians, Schaeffer ‘s take on homosexuality was certainly more tolerant
than the demagogic antigay messages that other religious conserva­
tives were preaching, particularly by the late 1970s, when opposition
to gay rights became a cardinal standpoint of the broader Christian
Right outlook. Of course ideas have consequences beyond the inten­
tions of their authors. The modern sensibilities that Schaeffer con­
ferred upon conservative Christianity undoubtedly attracted follow­
ers who would have otherwise remained neutral in the culture wars.
But partisan operatives who had few qualms about appearing mean­
spirited and bigoted also took note of how Schaeffer could be used to
their advantage.

Once Schaeffer gained a measure of American fame-once the
families of evangelical dignitaries such as Billy Graham became reg­
ular guests at L’Abri-conservative Christian leaders identified him
as the ideal conduit to a youth culture they failed to understand.
�vangelical leaders came to L’.Abri,” Franky writes, “so Dad could
teach them how to inoculate Johnny and Susie born-again against the

84
CHAPTER THREE

hedonistic out-of-control culture that had
Johnny’s older brother on

drugs and Susie’s older sister marching o
n the capital.” After being

recruited by evangelical pitchman Billy Ze
oli, who enrolled wealt�y

conservatives like Rich DeVos, the right-w
ing founder of Amway, m

the cause, Francis and Franky Schaeffer w
ent into the documentary

filmmaking business. Their partnership pr
oduced a thirteen-episode

film series in 1976-How Should We Then L
ive? The Rise and Decline

oif Western Thought and Culture-
which delivered Schaeffer’s wide-.

di 28
ranging Christian apologetic to enormous A

merican au ences. .
After speaking to packed houses on a film

tour across America,

the father-son tandem made another docu
mentary film series in 1979

with help from C. Everett Koop, an ardentl
y pro-life evangelical phy­

sician. This second series-W hatever Happe
ned to the Human Race?­

focused on pro-life issues, especially aborti
on. Franky says that their

films gave “the evangelical community a fr
ame of reference through

which to understand the secularization of Am
erican culture.” In this

way, Francis Schaeffer helped conservative e
vangelicals adjust to mo­

dernity by preparing them for the culture w
ars. His emergence as the

most influential evangelical theologian-as
a formative Christian cul­

ture warrior-also served notice that the i
ssues that aroused Ameri-

. h . 29
can conservatives were c angmg.

In the 1950s and well into the 1960s, the prim
ary political concerns

of many white evangelicals, especially in th
e South, were related to

racial desegregation. Jerry Falwell, pas
tor of the enormous Thomas

Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virgin
ia, and one of the most

recognizable evangelicals due to The Old-Ti
me Gospel Hour, a mi�s­

try television program that broadcast his se
rmons, preached agamst

religious leaders involved in civil rights activis
m. In his infamous 1964

sermon “Minsters and Marches,” Falwell lec
tured : “Preachers are not

called to be politicians, but soul winners.”
He also questioned “the

sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some c
ivil rights leaders such as

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr:’ Several evange
lical churches aided mas­

sive resistance to the civil rights movement
by starting Christian day

schools, where whites could send their childr
en to avoid the federally

mandated desegregation of the public schoo
ls. Bob Jones University,

an evangelical college located in Greenville
, South Carolina, forba�e

blacks from enrolling until 1971, after whi
ch it prohibited interracial

dating and marriage on the stated grounds
that “cultural or biologi-

Taking God’s Country Back 85

cal mixing of the races is regarded as a violation of God’s command:’
Given this, it was difficult to argue with the implicit rationale that in­
formed the IRS decision to revoke Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt
status in 1978, logic then upheld by the Supreme Court in its 1983 rul­
ing Bob Jones University v. the United States: for many white evangeli­
cals, Christian education was a cover for perpetuating racial segrega­
tion and discrimination. Indeed, disentangling the Christian Right’s
moral panic from white racial panic is no easy task. Even by the 1970s,
when most conservative Christians increasingly spoke about how ev­
eryone, regardless of race, was created in God’s image, racial anxieties
persisted in motivating many in their ranks. And yet there was more
to the Christian day school movement.30

Between 1965 and 1975 Christian day school enrollment grew by
over 202 percent, and by 1979 more than one million American chil­
dren attended Christian schools. The timing of such precipitous growth
suggests that it was a response to desegregation. Falwell’s Lynchburg
Christian Academy, for instance, opened its doors in 1967, the year
Virginia’s commissioner of education demanded proactive school
desegregation. But Falwell, seeking to distance himself from his ear­
lier position against civil rights, never spoke in racial terms about his
school, which admitted its first black students in 1969. He, did, how­
ever, speak in religious terms, arguing that the Supreme Court’s ruling
on school prayer justified the Christian day school movement, “the
hope of this Republic.” “When a group of nine ‘idiots’ can pass a ruling
down that it is illegal to read the Bible in our public schools, they need
to be called idiots.” The Christian day school movement grew in the
South, but it also exploded in states far removed from the old Confed­
eracy where desegregation was less of a concern. The California As­
sociation of Christian Schools listed 350 schools as members, includ­
ing a growing network of schools in San Diego run by Tim LaHaye,
who consistently made clear that his schools existed as an alternative
to secular humanist schools. Indiana Baptist school principal Robert
Billings’s widely circulated 1971 manualA Guide to the Christian School

�ed up the reason.that so many Christians were vacating the pub­
lic schools: it was the “growing trend toward the secularization.” In
sum, the popularity of Christian day schools owed as much to fears
a�out the secularization of curriculum as to resistance to desegrega­
lion, or at the very least showed that these two anxieties were not

86 CHAPTER THREE

mutually exclusive. Christian parents sent their children to Christian
schools out of a desire to have them avoid sex education, values clari­
fication, and Darwinism, not just blacks.31

No matter the actual motivations of the Christian day school move­
ment, in 1978 the IRS announced its intentions to enforce a 1970 law
that empowered it to revoke the tax-exempt status of private schools
proven to be racially discriminatory. Toe IRS stated that it would
prosecute those private schools that failed to make a good-faith ef­
fort to achieve student populations comprising at least s percent mi­
norities. Conservative Christians interpreted the IRS declaration as
government persecution. W hite evangelicals in particular felt be­
trayed because it came under the watch of one of their own, President
Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist who had admitted during the 1976
campaign to having a “born-again” personal redemption experience.
Rather than actively seek to admit more black students in order to
comply with federal law-a difficult endeavor in any case since few Af­
rican American parents were inclined to send their children to white
Christian day schools-evangelicals inundated the IRS with 120,000
angry letters of protest. Even though the IRS prosecuted only a few
Christian day schools due to the widespread hostility its ruling pro­
voked, Christian Right leaders attributed the politicization of evangel­
icals to the hazard posed by the IRS. “The IRS made us realize,” Fal­
well claimed, “that we had to fight for our lives.” Heritage Foundation
founder Paul Weyrich, reflecting on his efforts to bring conservative
Christians into the Republican Party fold, said he “had utterly failed”
for most of the 1970s. “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s
intervention against the Christian schools.” For religious conserva­
tives, Carter’s IRS symbolized the federal government’s brazen disre­
gard for their values.32

Before the IRS incited a burst of evangelical political energy, con-
servative anxieties about how the secular state was a menace to fam­
ily values had been bubbling to the surface for years. Toe traditional
family, an idealized version of the 1950s family unit that many Ameri­
cans thought to be the norm, embodied a conservative religious con­
ception of gender roles. It encompassed one man, one woman, and
children born within the confines of this heterosexual partnership.
Whereas “scripture declares,” according to Falwell, that the husband
should “be the spiritual leader in his family,” the wife was expected to
accept her subordinate but ultimately more gratifying role as home-

Taking God’s Country Back 87
maker. Add to this the fact that religious conservatives believed thatthe secular state impinged upon the social roles traditionally fulfilledby the family, and the fight for family values became essential to theChristian culture wars. As Falwell declared: “It is my conviction thatthe family is God’s basic unit in society. No wonder then, we are in aholy war for the survival of the family.”33

Family politics were so intense during and after the 1970s becausethe traditional nuclear family had experienced a period of unusual sta­bi_lity in the 1950s, followed by an era of unprecedented instability inthe 1960s. By the 1970s, signals that the traditional family was in declinewere everywhere, such as higher rates of divorce and out-of-wedlockpregnancy. This was the result of several factors, including economicchanges associated with deindustrialization and falling wages. The de­cay of the historically male “blue-collar” job market, mostly factorywork that tended to be well-paying and secure due to high degrees ofunionization, coincided with the explosion of the historically female”pink-collar” job market, mostly service work that tended to be low­paying, insecure, and nonunionized. Women entering the workforcein unprecedented numbers, in addition to the hardships associatedwith falling wages, put pressure on the traditional family model thatrelied upon a male breadwinner and a female caretaker.
Christian conservatives ignored such sociological explanations forthe crumbling family. Instead they blamed feminists, who had indeedbeen critical of the sexism inherent to the traditional family well be­fore economic transformations rendered that paradigm increasinglyobsolete. As opposed to feminist solutions to family problems, whichtook into account the new sociological realities of the late 197os-suchas a proposal for more flexible work schedules, which would, in the­ory, afford working parents more time to spend with their children -Falwell offered a streamlined solution. Men and women, he argued,needed “to get in a right relationship with God and His principles forthe home,” implying that women needed to stay home and care fortheir children while men worked to earn the family wage. Falwell didnot explain how American families might attain such an increasinglyIUDattainable objective.34

The traditional family remained at the forefront of American pol­itics during the 1970s not only because of its dissolution but also be­cause of the ongoing struggle to ratify the Equal Rights AmendmentiERA). The historical struggle for the ERA, of course, predated the

88
CHAPTER THREE

sixties. It had been on the agenda of woman’s right
s activists since

shortly after ratification of the Nineteenth Amendm
ent gave women

the right to vote in 1920. Politicians from both major p
arties endorsed

the ERA in the 1940s, but when it was first introduced
in Congress in

1947, liberal and conservative opponents objected th
at it would ne­

gate legislation that endowed women with special pr
otection.

Toe sixties feminist movement injected new life into
the struggle

for the ERA. As a sign of the feminist movement’s succe
ss, both houses

of Congress passed the amendment in 1972, sending it
to the states,

which were given seven years to ratify it. Thirty-eight s
tates were re­

quired for the proposed amendment to become law, an
d thirty ratified

the ERA in the first year of the process. But before the fin
al eight states

voted on ratification, a movement to stop the ERA gat
hered, ensur­

ing its eventual demise. Although the amendment’s ma
in provision –

“equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or a
bridged by the

United States or by any State on account of sex” -sound
ed innocuous

enough, both proponents and opponents thought it w
ould enlist the

federal government in the feminist movement’s goal of t
otal equality

between the sexes. Conservatives deemed such a prosp
ect dangerous

to the traditional family.
35

Toe individual most responsible for foiling the ERA w
as Phyllis

Schlafly, a conservative activist from St. Louis who firs
t made a name

for herself with her self-published bookA Choice, Not an
Echo, widely

distributed in support of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campa
ign for presi­

dent. In September 1972, after being convinced of the nee
d to resist the

feminist movement, Schlafly founded STOP ERA. Unt
il then she had

focused her activism primarily on national defense issues
. As a Cath­

olic, she had not yet been attuned to the social issues th
at animated

evangelicals, like school prayer. By shifting gears, Schla
fly brought a

large network of conservative Catholic women -those w
ho read her

Phyllis Schlafly Report, which had in the range of thirty t
housand sub­

scribers throughout the 197os-into the majority-evange
lical move­

ment to defeat the ERA. In this, like Francis Schaeffer,
she built ec­

umenical bridges to likeminded conservatives of differ
ent religious

faiths.36

Schlafly’s first shot against the ERA hit its mark, in th
e form of a

1972 Phyllis Schlajly Report essay, “What’s Wrong with
‘Equal Rights’

for Women?” Schlafly argued that the ERA would oblite
rate special.le­

gal protections afforded to women, including the insul
ation provide

Taking God’s Country Back

by the traditional family, which “assures a woman the most precious
and important right of all-the right to keep her baby and be sup­
ported and protected in the enjoyment of watching her baby grow and
develop.” In this Schlafly defined the parameters of the winning cam­
paign to defeat the ERA: if men and women were legal equals, fathers
had no obligation to provide for mothers. In other words, equal rights
for women actually meant that special rights for mothers would be re­
voked. Such special rights were paramount because Schlafly believed
that motherhood was a woman’s most fulfilling calling, a belief that di­
rectly challenged “women’s libbers” like Betty Friedan, who “view the
home as a prison, and the wife and mother as a slave.” Schlafly tarred
feminists as enemies of motherhood, an association that stuck.37

As resistance to the ERA grew throughout the 1970s, the ratifi­
cation process stalled. Some states that had previously ratified the
amendment even reversed their votes. As it became less and less likely
that the ERA would be ratified, Schlafly’s reputation as the intellectual
force behind the movement to defeat the ERA grew. With the 1977
publication of The Power of the Positive Woman, arguably the definitive

antifeminist manifesto, her status as the nation’s most iconic antifemi­
nist was cemented. The first step in becoming a “positive woman,” an­
other term for a confident antifeminist in Schlafly’s vocabulary, was to
embrace the natural differences between men and women. Consistent
with such an essentialist understanding of sexual difference, Schla­
fly encouraged STOP ERA activists to accentuate traditional gender
roles, such as dressing particularly femininely when lobbying state leg­
islators. To the dismay of feminists, this strategy worked to perfection.
Some of the more conservative legislators, of course, hardly needed
their paternalistic egos stroked in such a way. “To pass a law or con­
stitutional amendment saying that we are all alike in every respect,”
argued lliinois state representative Monroe Flynn, “flies in the face of
what our Creator intended.” Conservative Christians like Flynn re­
lated feminist attempts to eliminate sexual difference to secular efforts
to erase God from the public sphere. Schlafly snidely suggested that if
feminists had a problem with sexual difference they might also have a
problem with God. “Someone, it is not clear who, perhaps God,” she
wrote, “dealt women a foul blow by making them female.”38

Schlafly’s antifeminism had a playful side to it. When addressing
,Onservative crowds, she often started in the following way: “First of
all, I want to thank my husband Fred, for letting me come-I always

90
CHAPTER THR

EE

like to say that, because it makes the libs so mad!” Suc
h friskines� �as

an effective contrast to the humorless recrimination
s that feIIllrusts

directed her way. During a 1973 debate on the lllinois
State University

campus, Friedan infamously told Schlafly: “I would
like to bur� you

at the stake …. I consider you a traitor to your sex, an A
unt Tom. Flo­

rynce Kennedy wondered “why some people don’t hit
Phyllis Schlafly

in the mouth.” Such nastiness spoke to the fact that Sc
hlafly had come

to signify the backlash against feminism and the impen
ding defeat of

the ERA, which feminists believed was a necessary and
inevitable step

to full equality.39
Schlafly’s rhetoric, of course, could also be hard-hit

ting, such as

when she theorized about the ways feminism migh
t empower an

immoral government over and against the moral fam
ily. Describing

these implications in hypothetical fashion, she wrote:
“[I]f fathers ar_e

not expected to stay home and care for their infant chi
ldren, then nei­

ther should mothers be expected to do so ; and, therefo
re, it becomes

the duty of the government to provide kiddy-care cen
ters to relieve

mothers of that unfair and unequal burden.” Such analy
sis suggested

that women’s liberationists, in their demand for total eq
uality, wanted

to empower Washington bureaucrats to enforce soc
ial engineering

programs that would undermine the traditional fami
ly. In this Schla­

fly helped bring together two conservative trajectories
-cultural tra­

ditionalism and antistatism-demonstrating that the
culture wars,

rather than being an evasion of political-economic deba
tes about how

power and resources were to be distributed, represent
ed a new way

of having such debates. Exemplifying this comminglin
g of conserva­

tive ideologies, a 1976 Phyllis Schlajly Report headline a
bout a coming

convention on women screamed about “How the Lib
s and the Feds

d M ,,40 Plan to Spen Your oney.
Toe convention referenced in Schlafly’s headline, a go

vernment-

sponsored International Women’s Year (IWY) confere
nce, became a

lightning rod for cultural conservatives. Schlafly descr
ibed the 1977

Houston convention as “a front for radicals and lesb
ians.” Indeed,

many of those involved in organizing the IWY conven
tion �ere_ out­

spoken feminists, thanks to Midge Costanza, who, as C
ar�er s chie_f of

the White House’s Office of Public Liaison, was charged
with appoi.ntj

ing members to the IWY Commission. Costanza de
si�ate� liberal

New York congresswoman Bella Abzug-who once cl
aimed a wom­

an’s place is in the house, the House of Representatives
” -to chair the

Taking God’s Country Back 91

commission. Pentecostal televangelist Pat Robertson, who until then,
happy to have a fellow born-again Christian in the White House, had
sung Carter’s praises, seethed: “I wouldn’t let Bella Abzug scrub the
floors of any organization that I was head of, but Carter put her in
charge of all the women in America, and used our tax funds to support
that convention in Houston.” Costanza’s other selections, highlighted
by feminist notable Gloria Steinem, editor of Ms. magazine, did little
to inspire the confidence of religious conservatives, who organized to
gain their share of delegates to the Houston convention. After manag­
ing to secure control of only 25 percent of the delegation, Schlafly and
other conservative women decided to put on a counter-IWY confer­
ence at Houston’s Astro Arena . Their Pro-Family Rally attracted some
twenty thousand attendees.41

The IWY convention’s official platform, approved by vote of the
delegation, was decidedly left of center. Not only did it call for the
ratification of the ERA, but it also included abortion-on-demand and
gay rights planks. Toe staid feminism that had informed NOW at its
origins had given way to a more radical vision of gender equality, sig­
naled by Friedan’s public change of heart regarding the relationship
between feminism and gay rights. In 1969 she infamously called les­
bianism a “lavender herring,” charging that gay rights would tarnish
the feminist agenda. But at the 1977 Houston convention, Friedan sec­
onded a resolution to support gay and lesbian rights, a huge symbolic
victory for the gay rights movement. Although this newly expansive
alliance illustrated the power of New Left feminist sensibilities, it also
played into the hands of religious conservatives like Schlafly, who be­
lieved the radicalism of the IWY platform signified “the death knell
of the women’s liberation movement.” “The Women’s Lib movement
has sealed its own doom,” she proclaimed, “by deliberately hanging
around its own neck the albatross of abortion, lesbianism, pornogra­
phy and Federal contr.ol.”42

The national debate between feminists and the Christian Right per­
sisted throughout the Carter administration. In the summer of 1980,
another national conference, the White House Conference on Fami­
lies (WHCF), generated even more controversy. During his 1976 pres­
idential campaign Carter had promised that, if elected, he would host
� conference on the American family, wrongly assuming that sponsor­
mg such a conference would be politically safe. Since both liberals and
l,:>nservatives agreed the family was in crisis, he thought both sides

92 CHAPTER THREE

would be willing to convene to map out common-ground solutions.
Such faulty political logic was consistent with Carter’s antipartisan

temperament, which, against the grain of his centrist expectations,
earned him the enmity of both liberals and conservatives, both femi­
nists and antifeminists. The disputatious Houston convention quickly

disabused Carter and his advisers of the notion that a conference on
the family would be uncontroversial. They delayed holding it for as

long as they could without reneging on his campaign promise. They

also organized it such that Carter might keep his distance: instead of

one conference in the nation’s capital, which might attract criticism at
a time when Carter had enough problems dealing with stagflation and

the Iran hostage crisis, the White House hosted three regional con­

ferences, in Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. This strategy
failed. In an attempt to appease feminists annoyed with him for not

being an enthusiastic enough supporter of the ERA, and for stating his
personal discomfort with abortion, Carter gave his consent to a plu­

ral conference title: White House Conference on Families. Whereas
feminists believed that official recognition of the pluralistic ways an

increasing number of Americans lived would help remove the stain of

illegitimacy affixed to nontraditional families, such as those headed
by single mothers or gay couples, the Christian Right, abiding by tra­

ditional norms, defined the family in the singular and considered the

plural WHCF title an insult.43

The publicity generated by the battle over the WHCF gave con­
servatives an opportunity to advertise their own vision of the family,
which they presented in the form of the Family Protection Act, first

introduced in Congress in 1979 by Senator Paul Laxalt, a Nevada Re­
publican. This proposed legislation was an effortless mix of cultural
and economic conservatism. Had it passed, for example, it would have

drastically cut government childcare services, a menace to both fam­

ily values and anti tax conservatives. Among a laundry list of conserva­

tive wishes, the Family Protection Act prominently included an anti­

abortion provision that sought to deny Supreme Court jurisdiction to
review state laws that pertained to abortion.44

By the late 1970s, abortion had become a defining issue for the

Christian Right. But prior to Roe v. Wade, the momentous 1973 Su­

preme Court decision that legalized most abortions ih the first two

trimesters of pregnancy on the grounds that a woman’s right to pri­

vacy included control over her pregnant body, this was not necessarily

Taking God’s Country Back
93

the case. Before it was legalized, many evangelicals, like a majority of

Americans, held nonabsolute views on abortion. Though they might
have considered a fetus a living being, they might also have believed

that a fetus’s right to life should be balanced against other consider­

ations, including the health of the woman carrying it. fu short, prior

to Roe v. Wade many evangelicals held relativistic views about abor­
tion: they did not support an absolute right to privacy, but neither did

they favor a fetus’s absolute right to life. Aside from a few marginalized

fundamentalists-such as far-right preacher John Rice, the longtime

editor of The Sword of the Lord, who in 1971 wrote that he “viewed the
abortion legalization campaign as the latest liberal assault on morality

in a rapidly escalating culture war” -most evangelical leaders were

ambivalent. The SBC even supported liberal abortion laws, a posi­
tion it maintained until 1979, when conservatives ousted the moder­

ate leadership.45

The movement to legalize abortion, which had been banned in
most states since 1880, had ramped up in the 1950s. Doctors led the

early push to overturn anti-abortion laws, believing their status as
professional experts granted them the authority to decide what was

best for their patients. In the 1960s some states legalized “therapeu­

tic abortions,” those deemed necessary to protect the health of preg­
nant women as determined by doctors. In response, Catholics, the

only religious group consistently outspoken against the liberalization

of abortion laws, formed the nation’s first anti-abortion group in 1968,

the Right to Life League. For conservative Catholics, abortion seemed

like a clear-cut affront to the epistemological views that underpinned

their faith. They believed that the universe had an objective moral or­
der to which humans were bound. Abortion was murder, and murder

was wrong, plain and simple. Translated into the language of conser­

vative evangelicals, who eventually overcame their inhibitions about

joining a signature Catholic cause, abortion offended God’s will.46

Roe v. Wade forced forty-six states to liberalize their abortion laws,
leading to a national debate that compelled more Americans to take
a firm stance on the issue. Justice Harry Black.mun, who delivered

the Supreme Court’s majority opinion, recognized that the decision
was fraught with peril. In his opinion he wrote: “One’s philosophy,

one’s experiences, one’s exposure to the raw edges of human exis­
tence, one’s religious training, one’s attitude towards life and family
and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks

94
CHAPTER THREE

to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one’s thinking and
conclusions about abortion .” Blackmun was certainly right about that.
But he could not have predicted the degree to which abortion was to
be tied up with the war for the soul of America.47

Toe day after Roe v. Wade, a small-town Minnesota evangelical
wrote a scathing letter to the editor of her local newspaper, charging
that the “diabolical” decision was “glaring evidence that our society
is decaying rapidly with moral corruption.” Christianity Today, the
most important magazine of highbrow evangelical opinion, editorial­
ized: “Christians should accustom themselves to the thought that the
American state no longer supports, in any meaningful sense, the laws
of God, and prepare themselves spiritually for the prospect that it may
one day formally repudiate them and turn against those who seek to
live by them:’ Although most evangelical leaders were slower to re­
spond, the Christianity Today editorial anticipated the ways in which
an emerging evangelical opposition to abortion would be framed.

48

Francis Schaeffer nudged many evangelicals to oppose abortion.
Jerry Falwell credited Schaeffer for convincing him to become ar­
dently pro-life. So too did Randall Terry, who became the nation’s
most prominent anti-abortion activist in 1986, when he founded Op­
eration Rescue, which premised its militant tactics on the slogan “If
you believe abortion is murder, act like it’s murder.” Schaeffer saw
abortion as evidence of the humanistic disregard for life as a moral
absolute. He theorized that it was a slippery slope from abortion to
euthanasia and, more broadly, to the state’s having total authority over
decisions regarding who gets to live and who gets to die. “In regards
to the fetus, the courts have arbitrarily separated ‘aliveness’ from ‘per­
sonhood,’ and if this is so,” he asked, “why not arbitrarily do the same
with the aged?” In the 1979 pro-life film series W hatever Happened
to the Human Race? Schaeffer argued that abortion was a result of
a shift from a Christian-based society, in which each individual was
viewed as a unique creation of God, to a secular humanist society, in
which individuals were conceptualized as cogs in a larger biological
machine. Franky Schaeffer writes that his father pointed “to the ‘hu­
man life issue’ as the watershed between a ‘Christian society’ and a
utilitarian relativistic ‘post-Christian’ future stripped of compassion
and beauty.”49

Falwell, who by the end of the 1970s routinely referred to abortion

Taking God’s Country Back 95

as “murder according to the Word of God,” quoted Schaeffer exten­
sively whenever he discussed the topic. Like Schaeffer, Falwell be­
lieved that legalized abortion represented the tragic if logical conse­
quence of secular humanism’s negation of God. In this way Schaeffer
helped evangelicals like Falwell recognize that resistance to abortion
was of a piece with their anxieties about how a secular state was im­
posing its anti-Christian will on the nation. Recognizing as much com­
plicates the simplistic view held by many political observers that abor­
tion as a stand-alone issue pushed erstwhile Democrats into voting
for the Republican Party, which has included an anti-abortion plank
in every one of its platforms since 1980. This might have been true for
some Americans, especially for anti-abortion Catholics with historical
ties to the Democratic Party. And certainly some Republican politi­
cians have kept abortion on the national radar in order to gain elec­
toral advantage. For example, beginning in 1976 with Congressman
Henry Hyde from Illinois, Republicans have annually proposed rid­
ers to yearly appropriations bills-the so-called Hyde Amendments­
that would prohibit federal funds from being used for abortion. But by
the end of the 1970s the vast majority of pro-life Americans were re­
ligious conservatives who would have voted Republican whether the
Supreme Court had legalized abortion or not. As demonstrated by the
Family Values Act, proposed and supported by many Republicans but
hardly any Democrats, the Republican Party was increasingly coming
to represent a Christian Right worldview in general. Opposition to
abortion was a paramount component of that worldview, but only one
ingredient of a more general antisecular perspective.50

Another issue that religious conservatives felt strongly about was
the gay rights movement. The Christian Right opposed gay rights on
the grounds that homosexuality flouted the will of God as expressed
in the traditional family. When the Dade County Commission in Mi­
ami, Florida, approved an ordinance in 1977 that explicitly prohibited
discrimination against gays, religious conservatives mobilized under
the leadership of Anita Bryant, the former Miss Oklahoma and pop­
ular singer who called homosexuality “a disguised attack on God.” As
a countermeasure, Bryant helped place an anti -gay rights referen­
dum on Dade County ballots, which succeeded in overturning the gay
ri�ts ordinance by two to one. The Dade County ordinance stipu-·
lat1on that most disturbed Bryant and her fellow conservatives was

CHAPTER TH
REE

96

that schools could not discriminate agains
t gays when hiring teachers .

Concerned that gay men were more like
ly to be pederasts and that

they would recruit children to their “lifes
tyle;’ Bryant founded Save

Our children, a coalition that sought to ex
clude out-of-the-closet gays

hin &
• 51

from the teac g pro1ession.

In 1978 California state senator John Briggs
, a Bryant acolyte, intro-

duced Proposition 6, otherwise known a
s the Briggs Initiative, which

would have empowered California school
districts to fire “open and

notorious” gay teachers. Despite coming
quickly on the heels of the

conservative triumph in Florida, the Califo
rnia initiative was trounced

by over one million votes . Even former go
vernor Ronald R�agan p�b­

licly opposed the Briggs Initiative for the r
eason that he did not view

homosexuality as “a contagious disease li
ke the measles,” perhaps a

brave stance given that Reagan’s impend
ing run for the presidency

was going to require religious conservat
ive votes. Any joy that gay

rights activists felt as a result of such a resou
nding victory was crushed

three weeks later when openly gay San Fra
ncisco Supervisor Harvey

Milk, the leader of the campaign to defeat
the Briggs Initiative, was

gunned down, along with San Francisco M
ayor George Moscone, by

a homophobic former colleague. Falwell,
who had been campaigning

with Bryant against gay rights since the
Dade County referendum,

deemed the Milk assassination God’s judgm
ent. To his mind, the gay

rights movement was putting the nation i
tself at risk of �vine �etri­

bution. “Like a spiritual cancer, homosexua
lity spread until the city of

Sodom was destroyed. Can we believe that
God will spare the United

. . d•”S
2

States if homosexuality contmues to sprea

Tim LaHaye wrote a number of popular
books in the 1970s and

19sos that provided readers with a fram
ework for understanding

secular humanism in relation to issues like
the family, marriage, and

schooling. One such book, The Unhappy G
ays, an unsympathetic po­

lemic against homosexuality, was publishe
d a few months befor,�

the

vote on the Briggs Initiative, which LaHaye
saw as necessary to pro­

tect school children from being taught per
verted sex by a homosex­

ual.” He and his wife Beverly had relocated
to San Diego in 1956 from

the South where LaHaye had been a past
or since earning his bach­

elor’s de;ee from Bob Jones University. In
Southern California th_e

consequences of the sexual revolution, suc
h as casual sex and ea_sy di­

vorce were more out in the open than virt
ually anywhere else m the

natio�. And yet a large contingent of religi
ous conservatives also lived

Taking God’s Country Back 97

in Southern California, generating a productive friction that situated
the LaHayes at the forefront of resistance to cultural radicalism .53

The thesis LaHaye laid out in The Unhappy Gays, as the title sug­
gests, was that “homosexuals are unquestionably more miserable
than straight people.” LaHaye argued that the word gay was a deceit­
ful “propaganda word” when used as a synonym for homosexuali ty ,
citing liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. for support . In a 1977
Time magazine article, “The State of Language,” Schlesinger wrote the
following passage, subsequently quoted by LaHaye : “Gay used to be
one of the most agreeable words in the language. Its appropriation by
a notably morose group is an act of piracy.” LaHaye presented a list of
reasons why “gay isn’t gay,” including that gay men suffered unusually
high rates of depression, drug use, and suicide. In this he ignored the
likelihood that the cultural stigma attached to homosexuality, which
manifested in myriad forms of discrimination, was the actual cause of
their unhappiness . But LaHaye’s objective was not to cure discrimina­
tion. Like so many other evangelicals, LaHaye believed that commit­
ting oneself to Christianity, which affirmed heterosexuality as God’s
will, was the only path to personal redemption . In other words, belief
in Christ was the cure to homosexuality. In this LaHaye matter-of­
factly denied that homosexuality was occurring naturally. “No one,”
he wrote, “is born homosexual.”54

. Homosexuality was a key theme in right-wing jeremiads of that age.Like Falwell and most evangelical leaders, LaHaye believed that given
social space to thrive, homosexuality would be the death of America.
LaHaye introduced The Unhappy Gays with a fable about a trip he and
Beverly took to Italy, where a guide told them that a public bath at
the ruins of Pompeii was “for men only.” Mentally comparing that to
the public baths frequented by gay men in American cities like New
York and San Francisco, he wrote : “No wonder Gibbon concluded
that homosexuality w;s one of the moral sins that contributed to the
decline of the Roman Empire .” In the same ways that they pointed
to Engel v. Vitale as the beginning of American decline, conserva­
tive Christians often alluded to Edward Gibbon’s classic eighteenth­
ce�tury book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ,
which on their reading explained Rome’s collapse as the result of sex­
ual depravity, in order to prophesy the downfall of American civili-
2:ation. “A homosexually lenient society,” LaHaye warned, “will incur
the wrath of God.” Whereas America was once great because it was a

CHAPTER THREE

society based on biblical principles, “when sodomy fills the national
cup of man’s abominations to overflowing, God earmarks that nation
for destruction.”55

As opposed to those who had a more secular interpretation of
American history-including most academic historians-religious
conservatives held that America was founded as a Christian nation.
For the Christian Right, the belief that the United States was the prod­
uct of divine creation explained American exceptionalism. “I believe
that God promoted America to a greatness no other nation has en­
joyed,” Falwell preached, “because her heritage is one of a republic
governed by laws predicated on the Bible.” Beyond explaining na­
tional greatness, the narrative of America’s heavenly origins was also
important to Christian culture warriors because it undergirded their
critique of secularization by drawing a clear boundary between the
nation’s glorious past and its degraded present. “Either we will return
to the moral integrity and original dreams of the founders of this na­
tion,” Pat Robertson cautioned, “or we will give ourselves over more
and more to hedonism, to all forms of destructive anti-social behavior,
to political apathy, and ultimately to the forces of anarchy and disin­
tegration that have throughout history gripped great empires and na­
tions in their tragic and declining years.” Historian Donald Critchlow
points out that this Christian Right “moral sensibility” about the na­
tion and its history was rooted in the assumption “that free govern­
ment rested upon a moral or religious citizenry whose principal civil
responsibility was the protection of virtue. The sensibility upheld the
belief that ultimately republican government rested on moral founda­
tions that, if eroded, would lead to the collapse of the polity.”56

Given the mobilization of religious conservatives during the 1970s,
and given the biblical inspiration upon which their triumphant na­
tionalism rested, the Christian Right’s enthusiastic embrace of Ronald
Reagan’s 1980 presidential candidacy should not have been surprising.
It was Reagan, after all, who famously described the United States as
a “city on a hill,” a metaphor he borrowed from John Winthrop, who
borrowed it from Jesus. It was Reagan, not his evangelical opponent
Jimmy Carter, who attended James Robison’s 1980 Religious Round­
table in Dallas, where he knowingly told the gathering of adoring
evangelicals: “You can’ t endorse me, but I endorse you.” It was Rea­
gan who promised to reinstate school prayer, who campaigned to end
the alleged IRS persecution of Christian schools, who advocated for

Taking God’s Country Back 99

the teaching of creationism, saying that evolution was “theory only,”
and who vowed to overturn Roe v. Wade, avowing deep regret about
his earlier support for pro-choice legislation. It was Reagan who said:
“The First Amendment was written not to protect the people and
their laws from religious values, but to protect those values from gov­
ernment tyranny.”57

Reagan should hardly have been theologically palatable to white
evangelicals: despite dabbling in premillennial dispensationalism, a
distinctive Christian fundamentalist eschatology in which adherents
sought to decode signs of the coming rapture, he also showed interest
in Baha’i, astrology, and the Shroud of Turin. As one Carter supporter
bitterly pointed out, Reagan was “a Hollywood libertine, had a child
conceived out of wedlock before he and Nancy married, admitted to
drug use during his Hollywood years, and according to Henry Steele
Commager, was one of the least religious presidents in American his­
tory.” Yet Reagan won nearly 75 percent of white evangelical voters in
1980-and this should not have puzzled anyone. By unambiguously
aligning himself with Christian Right efforts to take God’s country
back, Reagan won over conservative evangelicals less interested in
his theology or his personal history than in his politics.58

Winning over the Christian Right in 1980 was a big deal. In re­
sponse to developments that they believed imperiled the nation­
secularization, feminism, abortion, gay rights-religious conserva­
tives intensified their involvement in political activism. Evangelical
leaders told their congregants that it was their duty to inject their reli­
gious beliefs into the political sphere. Falwell, in an apparent reversal
of his earlier claim that preachers should not participate in the civil
rights movement because it was not the role God had called them
to, proclaimed: “This idea of ‘religion and politics don’t mix’ was in­
vented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own coun­
�-” Tapp�d by_ well-connected Republican operatives Paul Weyrich,
��hard V1guene, and Hc,ward Phillips, Falwell founded Moral Major­
ity m 1979 as part of a larger effort to bring religious conservatives into
a powerful new political alliance. Falwell justified the need for Moral
Majority by arguing that Christian fundamentalists like himself had
more in common with similarly orthodox Jews and Catholics “than
we ever will with the secularizers of this country. It is time for all re­
ligious!� committed citizens to unite against our common enemy.”

59

Despite such ecumenical rhetoric, the vast majority of Moral

— –

100 CHAPTER THREE

Majority members were evangelicals. Other than abortion, its core
issues were evangelical concerns such as opposition to feminism, gay
rights, pornography, and the teaching of evolution. Nonevangelical
conservatives were welcome in Moral Majority: indeed, Catholics
purportedly constituted nearly 30 percent of the membership at the
peak of its influence in the early 1980s. But Moral Majority was im­
mediately powerful because there was an obvious need for a political
organization that would act as a vehicle for white evangelical causes.
In its first year it enrolled 2.5 inillion mostly evangelical members and
reported contributions in excess of $35 million. Moral Majority’s in­
fluence increased after it was deemed to have been crucial to Reagan’s
victory. In the immediate aftermath of the election, one prominent
headline read: “The Preachers Gave It to Reagan.” Such press fed into
Christian Right hyperbole, as Falwell claimed Moral Majority was the
main reason Reagan got elected. Liberals reacted to the 1980 election
results similarly, if from a different evaluative perspective. They fret­
ted about an impending theocracy, comparing the Christian Right to
Iranian fundamentalists who had taken American hostages, and often
called Falwell the American Ayatollah.60

Claims about the importance of newly energized evangelicals were
only half true. They ignored that even before 1980, conservative evan­
gelicals had often organized effectively behind conservative politi­
cians. The lnistake is repeated often by historians, who tend to argue
that 1980 represented the reemergence of conservative Christians in a
political sphere they had deserted after the huiniliation of the Scopes
Monkey Trial. Nixon’s 1972 reelection serves as an instructive coun­
terexample. Neoconservatives believed Nixon’s landslide represented
the will of urban ethnic whites like themselves who had grown weary
of a New Left they believed was dictating the McGovern campaign.
Such an account, though not entirely false, ignored that the key to
Nixon’s victory was winning over evangelicals. Nixon did better with
urban white ethnics than any Republican since the early twentieth
century, thanks largely to organized labor’s lack of enthusiasm for Mc­
Govern. But a startlingly high 84 percent of white evangelicals voted
for Nixon in 1972. The Nixon campaign was nothing if not smart about
demographic trends. The Sunbelt states were becoming incre�singly
populous, and evangelicals were the fastest-growing population in
those states. By the early 1970s the ten largest churches in the nation,
all evangelical, were located in the southern and western parts of the

Taking God’s Country Back
101

country. With this in mind, Nixon exploited issues that drew themto the voting booths. For instance, he leaked news that he had or­dered Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth’s novel about masturbationremoved from the White House library.61
Neoconservatives-the intellectual spokespeople for urban whiteethnics-might have innovated much of the logic that informed theconservative side of the culture wars, particularly in relation to late­twentieth-century racial discourse. But the Christian Right formedthe demographic bedrock of the conservative culture wars. Because ofthis, the war for the soul of America was as much a religious strugglebetween people of incompatible faiths-conservative Christians andse�ular liberals-as it was a fight over the nation’s ethnic and racial leg­ac1es. Of course these two distinct battle lines often overlapped in the1980s and 1990s, giving the culture wars narrative its valence.

306 NOTES TO PAGES 60-68

41. Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean

Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). Kenneth

Clark, Prejudice and Your Child (Boston: Beacon, 1955); Kenneth Clark, Dark

Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 131.
42. Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools

(New York: Basic Books, 1974), 251-380.

43. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes,

Puerto Ricans,Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 1963). Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan,

1909), 139, quoted by David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom (Ox­

ford: Oxford University Press, 2ou), 206.

44. The teacher’s discussion question and the unsigned letter are quoted in Podair,

Strike That Changed New York, 58, 124. The anti-Semitic poem is quoted in Gerson,

Neoconservative Vision, 159.

45. The Carmichael quote is in Ben Carson, “Stokely Carmichael,” inAfricanAmerican

Lives, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham ( Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2004); Nathan Glazer, “Blacks,Jews and Intellectuals,” Commen­

tary, April 1969. “Podhoretz on Intellectuals,” Manhattan Tribune, February 1, 1969,

4. Harnett and Young are quoted in Podair, Strike That Changed New York, 131,126.

46. Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn against Blacks (Cam­

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 216-17.

47. Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race,

Rights, and Taxes on America Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 31.

48. Nathan Glazer, “Is Busing Necessary?” Commentary, March 1972, 50. J. Anthony

Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Fam­

ilies (New York: Vintage Books, 1985). Matthew Richer, “Boston’s Busing Massa­

cre,” Policy Review, November 1, 1998.

49. James Q Wilson, “Crime and the Liberal Audience,” Commentary, January 1971,

71-78.

50. Ibid., 77.
51. David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, 10th anniversary

ed. (orig. 1995; New York: Basic Books, 2005), 177; Heilbrunn, They Knew They

Were Right, 14.

52. Historians of neoconservatism tend to ignore Midge Deeter. Ronnie Grinberg

serves as a useful corrective: “Jewish Intellectuals, Masculinity, and the Making of

Modern American Conservatism, 1930-1980 ” (PhD diss., Northwestern Univer­

sity, 2010 ). Jeffers, Norman Podhoretz, 207. Midge Deeter, The Liberated Woman

and Other Americans (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghehan, 1971), and

The New Chastity and Other Arguments against Women’s Liberation (orig. 1972;

New York: Capricorn Books, 1974).

53. Deeter, New Chastity, 43.

54. Deeter, Liberated Woman and Other Americans, 12.

55. For Bell’s self-label, see his The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, 20th anni­

versary ed. (orig. 1976; New York: Basic Books, 1996), xi. Daniel Bell, “Sensibility

NOTES TO PAGES 69-74 307

in tbe 6o’s,” Commentary, June 1971, 63. Midge Deeter, “Boys on tbe Beach,” Com­

mentary, September 1980, 38.
56. Gore Vidal, “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” in The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal,

ed. Jay Parini (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 343,345,341 (originally published in

The Nation, November 14, 1981).

57. George Nash, Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conserva­

tism (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009), 243-44.

CHAPTER THREE

1. Irving Kristo!, “What Is a Neoconservative?,” in The Neoconservative Persuasion:

Selected Essays, 1942-2009, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (New York: Basic Books,

2011), 149.

2. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen analyzes how Americans have come to grips with

modernity through reading Nietzsche, who made famous the “God is dead ” utter­

ance. American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2012).

3, George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping ofTwentieth­

Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 ).

4, James Davison Hunter pointed out that religious Americans gave up their sectarian

prejudices in order to form political and ideological alliances in the culture wars

in his now classic book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York:
Basic Books, 1991).

5. Leo Ribuffo, “Family Policy Past as Prologue: Jimmy Carter, the White House
Conference on Families, and the Mobilization of the New Christian Right,” Review
of Policy Research 23, no. 2 (2006): 311-37. Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life
of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). Marshner quote is
found in William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in
America (New York: Broadway Books, 1996), 182.

6. Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation of the American School: Progressivism in

American Education, 1876-1957 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961). John Dewey,

Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New

York: Macmillan, 1916). Adam Laats, Fundamentalism and Education in the Scopes

Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of America’s Culture Wars (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2010 ). Mencken’s quote is found in Richard T. Hughes, Christian

America and the Kingdom of God (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 137.

7. Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cam­
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 66-78. Andrew Hartman, Educa­

tion and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2008).
8. Bruce J. Dierenfield, The Battle over School Prayer: How “Engel v. Vitale” Changed

America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007). For the conservative re­

sponse to Engel, see Christopher Hickman, The Most Dangerous Branch: The Su­

preme Court and Its Critics in the Warren Court Era (PhD diss., George Washington

University, 2010); the Buckley passage is quoted on p. 1.

308 NOTES TO PAGES 75-79

9. Ronald W. Evans, The Social Studies Wars: What Should We Teach the Children?
(New York: Teachers College Press, 2004). The NEA advocacy of inquiry learn­
ing is found in Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements, Ken­
neth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence (hereafter Wilcox
Collection), Eagle Forum, Folder 4. The Helms letter is quoted in Joanne Omang,
‘”New Right’ Figure Sees McCarthyism in NEA’s Conference on Conservatism,”
Washington Post, February 24, 1979, found in National Education Association Re­
cords, Special Collections Research Center, Gelman Library, the George Washing­
ton University, Washington, DC (hereafter NEA Papers), Box 2128, Folder 9.

10. Martin, With God on Our Side, 102-16. Jeffrey P. Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shap­
ing of Adolescence in the 20th Century ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000).

11. First Hargis quote is found in Moran, Teaching Sex, 183. For others: Wilcox Collec­
tion, Billy James Hargis Folder 3: Letters, 1967-1969.

12. Trey Key, “The Great Textbook War,” West Virginia Public Radio, October 31,
2009. The “shot heard” and Marshner quotes are from the broadcast transcript.
Carol Mason, Reading Appalachia from Left to Right: Conservatives and the 1974
Kanawha County Textbook Controversy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2009); William H. Denman, “‘Them Dirty, Filthy Books’: The Textbook War in
West Virginia,” in Free Speech Yearbook 1976, ed. Greg Phipher (Falls Church, VA:
Free Speech Association, 1976), 42-50; and Ann L. Page and Donald A. Clelland,
“The Kanawha County Textbook Controversy: A Study of the Politics ofLife Style
Concern,” Social Forces 57, no. 1 (September 1978).

13. Most of these quotes can be found in “The Great Textbook War” radio transcripts.
The Jack Maurice quote is found in the NEA Archives, Box 2162, Folder 1. The
pamphlet passage is from Martin, With God on Our Side, 122.

14. NEA Archives, Box 2161, Folders 4-8: “Inquiry Report: Kanawha County, West
Virginia: A Textbook Study in Cultural Conflict” (NEA Teacher Rights Division,
Washington DC, 1975). The national correspondent was Russell Gibbons, writing
in Commonweal, found in Denman, “Them Dirty, Filthy Books,” 44,

15. J. Brooks Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Re­
ligious Right (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011). Wilcox Collection, Mel
and Norma Gabler, Folders 1 and 2. Daniel K. Williams, God’s Own Party: The Mak­
ing of the Christian Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 83-85. Jimmy
Brown, “Textbook Reviewing Is No Small Readout,” Gladewater Mirror, July 28,
1974, 1, 11.

16. Williams, God’s Own Party, 134-3 7. Rousas John Rushdoony, The Messianic Char­
acter of Education (Nutley, NJ: Craig, 1963), and Man Striving to Be God (Fenton,
MI: Mott Media, 1982).

17. Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivi­
alize Religious Devotion (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

18. Mark Chaves, “Secularization as Declining Religious Authority,” Social Forces 72,
no. 3 (1994): 749-74.

19. David Sehat shows that the separation of church and state was more abstract than

20.

NOTES TO PAGES 80-8 7 309

real in American life prior to the postwar era: The Myth of American Religions Free­
dom ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Charles Taylor, A Secular Age ( Cam­
bridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 488.
David A. Hollinger, “The Accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the
Enlightenment: An Old Drama Still Being Enacted,” D(l!dalus 141, no. 1 (Wmter
2012): 76-88. On the SBC convention, see Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of
the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 212. On the importance of the SBC to
Christian Right political power, see Williams, God’s Own Party, 6.

21. James Sire, foreword to Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who Is There (orig. 1968;
Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 15.

22. Barry Hankins, Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America ( Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008).

23. See Frank Schaeffer’s illuminating apostate memoir, Crazy for God: How I Grew
Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All ( or

Almost All) of It Back (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2007), 15, 116.
24.

25.
26.

For the reception of Nietzsche, see Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche.
Schaeffer, Crazy for God, 118. Schaeffer, God Who Is There, 29-30.
Schaeffer, God Who Is There, 2 7.
Ibid., 32-38.

27. Ibid., 57; Schaeffer, Crazy for God, 77.
28. Schaeffer, Crazy for God, 271-73.
29. Ibid. Williams, God’s Own Party, 141.
30. For quotes from Falwell’s “Minsters and Marches” speech, see Lee Edwards, The

Conservative Revolution: The Movement That Remade America (New York: Free
Press, 1999 ), 198. Bob Jones University v. the United States 461 U.S. 574 (1983), n. 6.
Terry Sanford and David Nevin, The Schools That Fear Built: Segregationist Acad­
emies in the South (New York: Acropolis Books, 1976). For a recent argument that
Christian day schools were mostly segregation by other means, see Joseph Cre­
spino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevo­
lution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 248-51.

31. William J. Reese, “Soldiers for Christ in the Army of God: The Christian School
Movement,” in History, Education, and the Schools (New York: Palgrave Macmil­
lan , 2007), m-33. The Falwell quote, as well as the figures on Christian day school
growth, is found in Williams, God’s Own Party, 85. Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the
Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to Our Children (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H.
Revell, 1983). Robert J. Billings, A Guide to the Christian School (Hammond, IN:
Hyles-Anderson, 1971), 12.

32. Falwell and Weyrich quotes are from Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Fam­
ily, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 17, 199.

33, Ribuffo, “Family Policy Past as Prologue.” For the first Falwell quote: Jerry Falwell,
Listen, America! (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 128. For the second: Flip­
pen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 56.

34, Robert 0. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the
1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 309-38. Falwell, Listen, America!, 128.

310 NOTES TO PAGES 8 8-97

35. Sharon Whitney, The Equal Rights Amendment: The History and
the Movement

(New York: F. Watts, 1984).

36. Donald T. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots Conservatism:
A Woman’s Cru-

sade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 212-42.

37. Phyllis Schlafly, “What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women
?” Phyllis Schlajly

Report, May 1972. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots Conservat
ism, 217-18.

38. Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of the Positive Woman (New Rochell
e, NY: Arlington

House, 1977), 11-12. Monroe Flynn’s quote is in Critchlow, Phyllis S
chlajly and

Grassroots Conservatism, 226.

39. Critchlow, Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots Conservatism, 247,
12, 227.

Schlafly, Power of the Positive Woman, 21. Self, All in the Family, 313
.

41. Schlafly quote is in Critchlow, Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots C
onservatism, 245.

Robertson quote is in Flippen,]immy Carter, the Politics of the Family, a
nd the Rise

40.

42.

of the Religious Right, 121.

Marjorie J. Spruill, “Gender and America’s Right Turn,” in Rightward B
ound: Mak-

ing America Conservative in the 1970s, ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julia
n E. Zelizer

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 71-89. “Betty F
riedan,” in

JoAnn Meyers, The A to z of the Lesbian Liberation Movement: Still the
Rage (New

York: Scarecrow, 2009 ), 122. Schlafly’s first quote: Flippen,]immy Car
ter, the Pol­

itics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 149; second quote:
Critchlow,

Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots Conservatism, 247-48.

43. Ribuffo, “Family Policy Past as Prologue.”

“The Family Protection Act,” H.R. 7955, 96th Congress (1979).44.

45. Daniel K. Williams, “No Happy Medium: The Role of Americ
ans’ Ambivalent

View of Fetal Rights in Political Conflict over Abortion Legalization
,” Journal of

Policy History 25, no. 1 (2013): 42-61. The Rice passage is quoted in Wil
liams, God’s

Own Party, 116.

46. For conservative Catholic philosophical underpinnings and how
they related to

abortion, see Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Pol
itics inAmer­

ica, 1950-1985 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995).

47. Harry A. Blackmun Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Co
ngress, Washing-

ton, DC (hereafter: Blackmun Papers), Box 151, Folder 2.

48. Blackmun Papers, Folder 10. The Christianity Today editorial is
quoted in Wil-

liams, God’s Own Party, 119.

49. Williams, God’s Own Party, 141-55. Schaeffer, Crazy for God,
273.

50. Falwell, Listen, America!, 173.

51. Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of th
e Religious Right,

136-38.

52. Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times
of Harvey Milk

(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1988). Falwell is quoted in Williams
, God’s Own

Party, 152.
53. Williams, God’s Own Party, 73, 152.

54. Tim LaHaye, The Unhappy Gays: What Everyone Should Know a
bout Homosexual-

ity (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1978), 41, 62.

NOTES TO PAGES 98-105 311

55. Ibid., 201-2.

56. Falwell, Listen, America!, 16. Robertson is quoted in James Davison Hunter, Cul­
ture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 112-13.
Critchlow, Phyllis Schlajly and Grassroots Conservatism, 8.

57. William E. Pemberton, Exit with Honor: The Life and Presidency of Ronald Reagan
(New York: M. E. Sharp, 1998).

58. Carter supporter is quoted in Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and
the Rise of the Religious Right, 319.

59. Martin, With God on Our Side, 191-220.

60. Flippen,Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 315.
61. One of the central revisions that Daniel Williams makes in God’s Own Party is that

the Christian Right did not emerge whole cloth in the 1970s, but rather that it was

a movement fifty years in the making. The anecdote about Nixon and Portnoy’s
Complaint is found in Courtwright, No Right Tum, 76.

CHAPTER FOUR

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: New American Library,

Inc, 1903), 19. Frederick Douglass, “The Color Line,” NorthAmericanReview, 1881.
Ralph Ellison, “What America Would Be Like without Blacks,” Time, April 6,

1970. The historiography of how immigrants became white is rich. Two good ex­
amples: David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the Amer­
ican Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became
White (New York: Routledge, 1995). On the “one drop” rule, see David Hollinger,
Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional

Affiliation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006),
especially chap. 2, “The One Drop Rule and the One Hate Rule.”

2. Robin]. Anderson, “Dynamics of Economic Well-Being,” in Household Economic
Studies (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2011). “Home Ownership Rates by
Race and Ethnicity of Householder, 1994-2010,” in Housing Vacancies and Home­
ownership: Annual Statistics 2010 (Washington, DC: US Census Bureau, 2011).

Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid School­

ing in America (New York: Random House, 2005). Michelle Alexander, The New
Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press,
2010 ). Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte ( orig. 1852; Mos­
cow: Progress Publishers, 1937).

3. Terry Anderson, The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action ( Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004), 71. K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color
Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1996), 125.

4. Anderson, Pursuit of Fairness, 108-28. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action
Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America

(New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).
5. Bunzel, “Black Studies at San Francisco State,” 36. Blackmun Papers, Box 260,

Folder 7: Syllabus, University of California Regents v. Bakke, p. II.