It`s fair to say the speech by presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan to the Republican National Convention in August did not go unnoticed, especially this passage:
”My friends, this (presidential) election is about much more than who gets what. It is about what we believe, what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”
Religious war? Cultural war?
Strong, provocative words. Some found them unforgettably chilling. They would reverberate for days in the news media, generating wide condemnation from columnists, editorial writers and commentators for what was regarded as their mean-spirited divisiveness.
The reaction of James Davison Hunter, a 37-year-old college professor who watched the convention on television at his home in Charlottesville, Va., was notably personal:
”I thought to myself, `My gosh, he`s reading from my book.` ”
Indeed, Buchanan was echoing the central theme of Hunter`s ”Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America” (Basic Books, 1991).
Hunter, a professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Virginia, was more disturbed than flattered. The concept he considered an analytical tool was being transformed into a political bludgeon, which is something, he says, that others from opposing sides of the political spectrum have also done.
”I truly believe we`re in the midst of a culture war in America,”
Hunter says. ”I think that`s the best way to describe what is going on, but it makes me nervous when people like Buchanan use the term as a call to arms or a program of political action.”
The war embraces an array of familiar issues, Hunter says, everything from abortion, gay rights, child care, funding for the arts, family leave, values in public education, euthanasia and multiculturalism to political correctness, ”Murphy Brown” and Christopher Columbus.
It is primarily waged, he says, among the ”cultural elite,” who are
”people who derive their livelihoods from the production and distribution of knowledge and information.”
The cultural elite, Hunter says, includes politicians, professors, lawyers, the clergy, the news media, figures in the entertainment industry and leaders of philanthropic foundations. Vice President Dan Quayle, he says, is as much a part of the cultural elite as the creators of ”Murphy Brown.”
He believes the news media fail their audience by offering generally superficial reports about battlefield engagements.
”For the most part,” he says, ”stories about abortion and other issues that are part of the war are treated as occasional and unrelated flareups of craziness by extremists. Coverage is usually reduced to the zero-sum logic of who`s winning and who`s losing. Rarely do we get the kind of interpretation and background that we should have.”
Hunter delivered a briefing on the war this month at a conference in Indianapolis held by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, which is headquartered in that city.
In interviews and formal remarks to the conference, and throughout his book, Hunter emphasizes the need for an understanding of the nature and causes of the conflict to alleviate the tensions in our society.
To attach traditional labels of liberal and conservative, he says, Democrat and Republican, to antagonists is to obscure the source of their divisions.
”The cleavages at the heart of the contemporary culture war,” he says, are the result of two fundamentally different assumptions about moral authority. These assumptions are rooted in religious traditions and address our core beliefs about what is right and wrong, good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable in our private and public lives.
These ”competing moral visions,” Hunter continues, are not always expressed ”in coherent, clearly articulated, sharply differentiated world views” but ”as polarizing impulses or tendencies in American culture.”
He identifies these as ”the impulse toward orthodoxy and the impulse toward progressivism.”
These impulses cut across the nation`s major religious faiths, resulting in new alignments developed only in the past 30 years within Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism.
Through most of American history, Hunter explains, religious conflicts tended to pit Christians against Jews and Protestants against Catholics. Although there were doctrinal fissures among Protestant denominations, the Catholic and Jewish faiths were essentially united, the former by anti-Catholicism, the latter by anti-Semitism.
Now, however, Hunter says, doctrinal splits are occurring within the major faiths along the orthodox and progressivist fault lines, bringing conservative Jews, Protestants and Catholics together on one side, and their liberal counterparts together on the other.
Those subscribing to the orthodox impulse ”are almost always cultural conservatives,” while those holding ”progressivist moral assumptions tend toward a liberal or libertarian social agenda,” but ”people and
organizations will cross over the lines, taking conservative positions on some issues and liberal views on others.”
The orthodox view holds that the laws by which we live are eternal and unchanging. For evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, Hunter says, the source of such law is ”the inerrant and authoritative” Bible, for conservative Catholics ”the Roman Magisterium” or church teachings and, for Orthodox Jews, the ”Torah and the community of Orthodox Jews.”
Even non-religious cultural conservatives ”operate with a very high view of Nature, whose function is very much like the transcendent, eternal source of moral authority” for religious believers.
The progressivist view, Hunter says, ”tends to be much more skeptical, more relativistic,” seeing ”the ultimate good as deriving from our knowledge and experience of the world. Truth, then, is not fixed but unfolding. It is not revealed once and for all but is being discovered among personal and collective encounters with the world.”
Progressivist ranks are also increased by secularists, ranging from the nominally religious to agnostics and atheists.
Debate over issues in the war is often dominated by persons who speak for special-interest organizations promoting a particular and usually extreme position on a particular issue, he says.
”These institutions possess tremendous power in the realm of public discourse,” Hunter writes. ”They almost seem to have a life of their own: an existence, power and agenda independent of the people for whom they presumably speak.”
In reality, he says, a majority of Americans ”occupy a vast middle ground between the polarizing impulses in American culture” and have no access to public debate.
”Most of us live our lives far removed from these pitched battles until there is a moment in which these matters become real for us,” Hunter says.
”Maybe a daughter has an unwanted pregnancy or a cousin comes out of the closet or the local school is using a controversial book.
”If we have moderate pro-life or pro-choice views, these views tend to be caricatured into one side or the other, into these polarized categories, these rhetorical extremes.”
Such positions, he asserts, are ”basically stereotypes, which do not give psychic comfort that help us resolve our inner tensions about these complicated issues.
”If we are moderately pro-choice and we hear that 40 percent of all abortions are second abortions, which suggests abortion is being used as a means of birth control, it makes us nervous.
”Likewise, if we are pro-life and confront a woman in desperate straits, we become uncomfortable with cliches and slogans. In real-life circumstances, people don`t invoke the slogans because they don`t work.”
Among the groups on the progressivist special-interest roster, Hunter says, are the ACLU, People for the American Way and National Organization for Women. Some of those on the other side are Operation Rescue, the Christian Coalition and the American Family Association, he says.
”All these organizations generally have a no-compromise policy toward their issue or set of issues,” Hunter says. Both sides are strident, employing rhetoric that ”exaggerates the power and intentions of their opposition.”
Among epithets progressivists hurl at opponents: right-wing zealots, religious nuts, fanatics, extremists, moral zealots, fear brokers, militants, demagogues, right-wing homophobes, patriots of paranoia.
Targets of cultural conservatives have been tagged as: self-righteous, militant, deceitful, treacherous, masters of deceit, intellectual barbarians, amoral, anti-Christian, advocates of a godless liberal philosophy, the regnant evil of our time.
Each side tries to ”appropriate the intentions of the framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights,” and each side bombards its followers with direct mail, which ”uses bald-faced, and rather cynical, manipulation of emotions. The object is to make the reader either indignant or scared,” he says.
Among enemies demonized by the direct mail of both sides: Pat Robertson, the pope, Carl Sagan, Oliver North, Jerry Falwell, Ted Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Norman Lear (described in the book by the now-defunct Moral Majority as
”the number one enemy of the American family”).
The different ways each side defines words such as ”freedom” and
”justice” illustrate the difficulty in reaching agreement.
”Where cultural conservatives tend to define freedom economically (as individual economic initiative) and justice socially (as righteous living),” Hunter writes, ”progressives tend to define freedom socially (as individual rights) and justice economically (as equity).”
The contrasting definitions of art are also instructive.
”For cultural conservatives, art, or at least art worthy of public support, is defined by its capacity to elevate the public mind, bringing it in contact with the ideals of a higher reality of beauty, truth, goodness,”
Hunter says.
”For cultural progressives, art is more a creation of reality itself, a personal statement by artists of their quest to understand and interpret their experience of the world.”
Little wonder that the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and ”The Last Temptation of Christ,” the movie adaptation of a novel by Nikos Kantzanzakis, represented blasphemy to cultural conservatives.
During a question-and-answer period at the Indianapolis conference, a man in the audience disagreed with Hunter`s assessment that today`s conflicts are distinctive. ”Our history has been filled with these kinds of divisions,” he said. ”Where`s the empirical evidence that it`s now worse than during the Civil War or even the Vietnam War?”
Hunter replied: ”I`m not saying it`s worse or better. It`s true we`ve argued and fought and even killed each other over many different things. I`m simply trying to make sense of empirical data that I don`t think you can make sense of in any other way.”
Martin Riesenbrodt, associate professor of sociology and divinity at the University of Chicago, doubts that cultural issues are significant in this election. ”I agree that these issues were at the heart of the conflict of the `80s, but I think economic problems have taken over.
”Maybe cultural issues aren`t as dramatic as he presents them, but I think he is correct in his presentation of his concepts, although I find `war` to be a harsh word for what seems a normal conflict of disagreement in a democracy.”
Hunter is not brimming with hope over how to bridge the cultural chasm.
”If the culture war is about who we are and what kind of community we choose to live in, then the only democratic way to get beyond it is through the messy, complicated, intractable, long, tedious process of arguing with each other in a serious and substantive way about these kinds of issues.”
The forum for such argument must be provided by ”the civil institutions of society that mediate between the state and the individual”-the media, religious institutions, philanthropic groups.
”Part of the problem, however, is that many of these institutions have chosen sides within the conflict and in effect are acting like special-interest groups themselves.
”The book asks how a democracy faces up to the challenge of a culture war. I`m not sure we can,” Hunter says. ”I`m very pessimistic at this moment.”
