It has been a week of popes and pedophiles, Muslims and cartoons on television, a week where Christianity has been challenged once again in the US. A bad week, perhaps, for those of a religious orientation.
The past week has been a good one, however, if you like the longest war in American history. That would be the many conflicts linked by a term, "culture war." This war raged on unnamed for decades, even generations.
It was given its name belatedly, very much so, when it was declared by Profound Philosopher Patrick Buchanan at the Republican National Convention a decade ago. The clash of worldviews between religionists and secularists to say nothing of skirmishing between confessions as well as rhetorical firefights of a more intramural nature between denominations and factions within a particular confession are older than the American Republic. And, that does not require tracing the Jesus Wars back to Europe. Nope, we can confine the battlefield to the land which would become and became the US of A.
What makes the wars of, about, and over religion so enjoyable in the US is the embedded freedom of conscience which was unique to this country and some of its constituent colonial progenitors. A free conscience, one which is not governed by the dictates, fiats, and limitations of the State is one which can give full expression not only to faith but allow the fruits of faith to spread their seeds on the fields of state policy.
Similarly, a free conscience which is not forced to mouth acceptance of and compliance with the dogmas, doctrine, and rituals of a state approved religion is one which can reject all religions with complete impunity. Religionists of all stripes as well as secularists both hard and soft can follow the dictates of the inner voice. Because religion is voluntary, because belief is not a subject of official approval or opprobrium as it has been and continues to be in so much of the world, we are able, even encouraged, not only to believe but to talk and act in the public square according to them.
Or, at least, that has been the case.
Religion has fallen on hard times in recent years. For forty or so years now religiously predicated words have been increasingly marginalized in public discourse. Increasingly, religion has been defined as a purely "private" matter which should not be mentioned in the public square. An exception has been carved out for ritualistic "god talk" by public figures during the course of political campaigns or, on some occasions, as a liturgical constituent of formal events.
In part, the decreased status accorded religion in the public square can be placed correctly at the feet of the Supreme Court. The issue of church-state separation had not proven particularly vexing to Americans before the late 1950s and the early years of the next decade.
The role of religion in the public square had been governed by a sort of gentlemen's agreement rooted in the historical reality that Americans were and had always been a primarily Protestant Christian bunch. The grudging acceptance of Catholics and a (relatively) microscopic number of Jews into the American square did little to perturb the equanimity with which most Americans viewed the close association of religion and religiously derived views in normal political and social affairs.
It came as a shock when the Court dramatically raised the height of the wall separating church and state in a series of decisions involving the relation of religion and public education. Arguably these decisions (characterized then and now by Christian spokesmen as "tossing God out of the public schools) can be seen as having been exercises in overkill. Perhaps even Madison, the proponent of the most absolute barriers between communities of faith and the political state, would have found them such.
Only Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island colony, and the strongest proponent of total and complete separation of church and state would have applauded the Supreme Court's holdings in the array of church-school decisions in the early and mid '60s. To the majority of Americans at the time the question was, "What's all the fuss about? A few prayers never hurt anyone."
To Americans who held a religious faith closely and powerfully, the Warren Court decisions were a deeply wounding blow to their vision of America as a Christian nation. The later decisions of the Court most importantly that in Roe v. Wade did the same to an even greater degree. In a real sense the Warren Court fired the opening salvos in the modern day "culture war."
At the same time the context in which religion existed in the US continued to change, and change with ever greater rapidity. Earlier changes in context brought about by scientific discoveries had been assimilated by most Americans even when the new scientific knowledge seemed to challenge deeply held Biblically rooted beliefs.
For example, if one looks at a selection of curricula and textbooks used in biology courses in both public colleges and high schools for the decades following the Civil War, one quickly finds that evolution and later, genetics, entered the classroom without any controversy. Laws such as that passed in Tennessee were exercises which, if not without purpose, were without effect. The governor of Tennessee who signed into law the enactment which later brought about the most famed non-event in American legal history, the Scopes "monkey trial," said that he believed the law would have no effect, would not be enforced and put no teacher at risk--otherwise he would not have signed it.
Far from being the mortal blow to the presumed yokels of Tennessee and elsewhere which the Scopes trial was believed to have been, it resulted in the slow, almost insensible removal of any reference to evolution from high school and some college level texts over the next three decades. Evolution was banned from the classrooms of most of the US not by the actions of any presumably backward looking fundamentalist Christian, but by the fear on the part of publishers that another media circus of the Scopes trial variety would involve one of their products.
Only in the years following the shock of Sputnik and the educational reforms which ensued did evolution come back to school, bringing in its train the political protestations of fundamentalist and other evangelical Christians. This dynamic must be viewed in the context of other sweeping and deeply disturbing changes in the American social and cultural landscape including integration, very rapid technological and economic transformations, the impact of an unpopular war, and global anxiety over the Cold War and the possibility it would turn mushroom hot.
Christians, particularly those who hewed to the evangelical and fundamentalist positions, were not solely, or, perhaps, even chiefly responsible for the start of the expel Darwin movement, much as they became the later exploiters of the issue. Arguably, the civil rights movement, the Great Society programs, the anti-war demonstrations, and the growth of hair on the heads of young American men and the use of the "Pill" by young American women were much more culpable.
Ah, yes, the inevitable invocation of the most universal of laws, the Law of Unintended Consequences.
The same applies to other features of the "culture war" which escalated rapidly during the dull, dismal years of the Seventies: pornography, the status of women, and, most of all, abortion rights.
The myth map of America, a map each and every person carries deep in the basement of the mind, was being challenged each and every day by very real, very disturbing changes in quotidian life. Events did not mesh with the myth map. Something was wrong! To many the wrong was to be found in Americans having abandoned their Christian foundation. And, to many of these, it was obvious: a house without a foundation cannot stand.
It was time to get back to our basics, these folks announced in terms which were not at all uncertain.
(To be continued in the next post. The sun is going west at a high rate of knots and the Geek has to cut some wood for cooking and heating tonight. Such is life off the grid in mountains which are both high and cold even as the heat of summer looms--at least on the calender.)
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