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The Religious Right/Secular Liberal Split: Is it an Illusion?

Brian Leiter

This article suggests as much. Here is the conclusion (but do read the whole thing if you want to comment):

“But as liberal practices like divorce, congregation-switching, rock music, sex toys, Medicare and therapy worm their way into the religious heartland, it becomes less easy to pick out distinctively liberal horrors from which to save the people. The gay bogeyman still half works. Evolution and atheism still work.

“It will be intriguing to watch the evolution issue over the next twenty-five years. Medicine is starting to revolve around genetics. Middle America wants its health quite as much as it wants its makeovers, sex, malls, and certainty of heaven. How can one accept gene-based medicine and reject evolution? So believe this: evolution will follow rock music and female orgasms deep into the hearts of the faithful. New reasons will have to be found to hate the liberal elite.

“Meanwhile, liberals will thrash around in their nightmare of religious takeover, for lack of actually knowing enough conservative religious people, who are all rather slowly becoming like the rest of us.”

What do you think? I’d be interested to hear what readers make of this. No anonymous posts please.

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7 responses to “The Religious Right/Secular Liberal Split: Is it an Illusion?”

  1. Willard S. Moore

    Probably true that high levels of political passion or hostility are not widespread and, therefore, not found in mass organizations such as churches or among student bodies, being confined to elites such as evangelical clergy (on the right) or university faculty (on the left). But this doesn't mean that cultural warfare won't continue: most French or Germans didn't hate each other in 1914; most white Southerners didn't own slaves and most Northerners weren't abolitionists in 1860, etc. It could even be, as in the preceding examples, that one side or the other will be more or less totally defeated.

    As a student of sociology, I do want to challenge one point: I don't think that, if you exclude first-generation members of ethnically-based churches, there is any evidence that congregation-switching has increased over any period of American history.

    Reply
  2. Francis Logan

    I'm not sure what the point of the article is. I'm a liberal Democrat, most of my friends are liberal Democrats, but my boss is a staunch Orange County California republican.

    No one I know "thrashes around" in nightmares of religious takeover. To the contrary, we are all pretty comfortable that we are winning the culture wars.

    Sure, the Texas Taliban can hold their wacky beliefs. I don't much care. I do care a great deal when they seek to impose those beliefs on others, whether through federal restrictions on useful lines of research or state inclusion of intelligent design teaching.

    But these idiots are for the most part losing. Their few victories are trumpeted far and wide, but largely quickly reversed. Reading your blog, and Pharyngula, and Panda's Thumb, gives me great comfort that there exists a critical mass of rational people who devote significant amounts of time to stamp out these little flash fires.

    The leadership of both parties, and the NGOs which support them, need to paint the struggles that divide us in the most extreme terms: therein lies the ability to raise funds.

    But I know a fair bit about some of this country's environmental laws. The impact of environmental laws is not as severe as the business community like to claim, and the proposed revision (in both the Clinton and Bush administrations) are not so radical as depicted. the disputes are largely at the margin.

    To me, the bogeymen of both sides are largely created by those interested in seizing and holding power. The actual differences between us all continue to diminish with time.

    Reply
  3. Tyler Whitmer

    First…as a young agnostic liberal raised Southern Baptist in Texas, I find that this comment, though perhaps generally true, does not represent the reilgion that scares me (or the one I grew up in):

    "After all, the popular churches all now stress love over doctrine, sin, or blame."

    Show me how the religion of Tom DeLay, John Ashcroft, et. al. is about love rather than doctrine, sin or blame.

    Second…to casually reference the "Left Behind" series as some popular fantasy pulp series is to fundamentally misunderstand the method through which fundamentalism operates in this country. The narrative of the end times is a cultural centerpiece, but it is also a call to arms. The series is billed as fiction, but can be read as a socio-political manifesto. If you want to read good fiction about fundamentalism, may I suggest Tom Robbins' "Skinny Legs and All." Robbins lambasts from the outside what the "Left Behind" books are to the core…religious fanaticism alive and well, working tirelessly to bring about the end of the world. I have a problem with that not as a liberal, but as a breathing person.

    That may sound like I'm just buying into the liberal nightmare to the Nth degree, but when my AG and my President both believe that if the world ends they will live eternally in paradise and I will burn forever in misery, I can't help but feel they don't have my best interests at heart.

    I can only hope the leaders are frauds, using the faith of the masses as a leash to lead them against their financial best interest. That is a sad thing for a young man to hope for from his leaders.

    Third…our author acts as though it is "christians generally" who hold political power in the modern American right wing. He is wrong. Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, John Ashcroft, and gang are not "christians generally" who are cool with switching churches and the female orgasm. They are modern fundamentalists who have a distinct ideology that embraces none of what Belden sees as moderating forces in modern American Christianity.

    My verdict? Our author here hasn't had much contact with real, American fundamentalism. Sounds to me like he's an Englishman living in the north who is a moderate Christian. Let's see:

    "Dave Belden, an Englishman living in New York State, is a corporate business writer. He has worked as a religious volunteer in India and Ethiopia, as a carpenter in England and America and is an active member, and past President, of a small congregation in Catskills, New York."

    Hmmmm….

    Reply
  4. Dan

    The religious right can always find reasons to hate the liberal elite. If they start to accept evolution, they can still harp on various aspects of biotechnology. Biotech is the science of the soon-to-be present, which means it will also soon be central to the controversy of religious polemic.

    Reply
  5. Chris

    Tyler Whitmer makes an important distinction between the fundamentalist Christian right on the one hand and majority of Christians on the other. I am from one of the most religious and conservative states in the union, Utah. Mr. Whitmer is right about fundamentalists, but our author is right about Christians more generally. More and more Utahn's are becoming what we call "jack Mormons." These are the sort of people that our author is spot on about.

    I would like to take issue with the phrase "liberal elite" in Dan's post. We on the left should stop using that phrase. Their is a reason that the mascot of the Democratic party is a Donkey. It is a working animal and it represents a party that until recently represented the interests of the working class. Allow me to quote something I saw Bush say at fundraiser. "Some call you the elite, I call you my base." We progressives need to start talking about the conservative corporate elite. We shouldn't say "tax breaks for the richest 1%" We should say "tax breaks for the elite 1%" Language matters and what we call things ought to correspond with reality.

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  6. seth edenbaum

    Harold and Kumar are at White Castle. The Simpsons and King of the Hill are still big hits, and those nice young men from Queer Eye are helping Christian housewives with the decorating, though of course they all take time out for a little buzz from a joint, or maybe a vibrator. So what does the American liberal establishment have to fear from religious conservativsm, either Christian (or Islamic)? In the long run, not much.

    Who won the Vietnam war?
    Nike, 20 years later.

    Reply
  7. Carl Christensen

    Much as I wish it were so, I cannot agree with Francis Logan's view that, with regard to environmental laws, "the proposed revision (in both the Clinton and Bush administrations) are not so radical as depicted" and "the disputes are largely at the margin." If it appears that way, it is only because the Right learned early on that these laws have too much support to be vulnerable to a frontal assault, so it was necessary for them to mount a stealth attack that would weaken them through a multitude of low-visibility rule changes and esoteric and facially neutral but result-oriented constitutional interpretations (stricter standards for plaintiffs' "standing," using the Commerce Clause and the "takings clause" of the Fifth Amendment to weaken the scope of, e.g., the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act, etc.; the ever-growing scope of the Eleventh Amendment is an analogous tactic in the civil rights context) that achieve their ends in a way that doesn't arouse public opposition. If these and other environmental laws still have some bite, it is only because the Right doesn't yet have the votes, either in Congress or on the Supreme Court, to destroy them as they would like to do; it is NOT because of any lack of desire on their part to achieve that aim as soon as they think they can get away with it.

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