God and Country: America in Red and Blue

Chapter 6. THE USUAL SUSPECTS

Chapter 6 THE USUAL SUSPECTS 105 Christopher Mooney has offered an insight critical to our understanding of contemporary culture war debates: morality policies are “no less than legal sanctions of right and wrong, validations of particular sets of fundamental values” (2001, 3). He also highlights a factor essential to understanding both the reason particular conflicts emerge when they do and the reason they arouse such passions: it is only when values are threatened that they need to be defended—i.e., codified and thus reaffirmed . It is only when cultural shifts threaten the taken-for-granted nature of their worldviews that people find it necessary to fight for their continued dominance. And when threats to basic values do occur, they cut so deeply into the core of a society that their codification appears imperative, literally, to “save the world” as it has been known. These values define not only who each individual is and his or her place in society but also the society itself. If these values change, then society changes. Nothing is certain anymore. It is as if Newton’s Third law of motion was suddenly repealed. (4) In many of the policy debates we will consider in part 3, the ways in which our conflicting worldviews predispose us to support particular policy choices are widely influential, but largely unseen; there is no readily recognizable religious dimension to the questions under consideration . In other areas, however, religiously rooted worldviews are more obvious—sometimes glaringly so—but highly salient to far fewer people . These are the so-called morality or culture war issues—abortion, gay rights, prayer in public school, stem cell research, sex education, the propriety of teaching creationism or intelligent design, alongside evolution in science classes—for some people, even smoking or recycling. These issues engage partisans’ passions in ways that economic or environmental debates seldom do. The intensity of these conflicts generates considerable attention from lawmakers and the media, obscuring the fact that the interest groups involved are not representative of the far more complex views on these matters held by most Americans. Civil libertarians are often bemused by American Puritans’ unflagging determination to outlaw sin, and liberal theologians are fond of pointing out that coerced piety is by definition inauthentic. Policy scholars write earnest treatises on the ineffectiveness—and frequently, the counterproductive nature—of attempts to legislate private, consensual behaviors. Lawyers worry that—because such laws are largely unenforceable and widely ignored—the passage of measures that are largely symbolic encourages contempt for the rule of law. However true such observations may be, they miss the essential nature of these conflicts. Rather than efforts to actually control the individual beliefs or behaviors involved, these highly fraught campaigns are best understood as efforts to control the cultural narrative, to ensure that a particular worldview is a privileged feature of America’s “legitimizing mythology.” In the United States, law has become the preeminent arena for cultural competition (Mazur 1999). In his classic study of the American temperance movement, Joseph Gusfield noted that policy differences between ethnic and religious groups have assumed a greater importance in the United States than in Europe partly because American economic divisions have been less dramatic . Gusfield characterized those cultural disputes as 106 / God and Country The Usual Suspects / 107 one way through which a cultural group acts to preserve, defend, or enhance the dominance and prestige of its own style of living within the total society. In the set of religious, ethnic, and cultural communities that have made up American society, drinking (and abstinence) has been one of the significant consumption habits distinguishing one subculture from another. It has been one of the major characteristics through which Americans have defined their own cultural commitments . (1963, 3) It is the contested nature of these values, the fact that so many Americans do not share them (or even actively oppose them), that creates the urgency, the felt need to enlist the power of the state to affirm them. This insight helps to explain why antagonists take positions that otherwise seem frustrating, illogical, and inexplicable. When a proponent of legal recognition of same-sex marriages asks opponents for any “real” evidence that such recognition will harm or otherwise affect heterosexual marriages, he or she will be mystified when opponents respond with variants of “It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Those who are outraged by the same-sex challenge to traditional...