What Motivates Cultural Progressives?: Understanding Opposition to the Political and Christian Right

Notes

247 Notes Chapter 1 1 While the influence of Christianity has waned in Europe, there is clearly a growing influence of Islam. It remains to be seen whether the secular society of Europe can withstand the emerging Islamic culture. One reason it may not is that the birth rate among white Europeans is not a replacement rate and is much lower than that of the Muslim immigrants coming into the European countries. The culture war does continue in Europe, but the traditional religious combatants have changed. 2 The acceptance of Muslims as potential allies of this new traditional coalition was clearly a possibility in the 1980s and 1990s. However, with 9/11 so fresh in our minds, it is unclear how much they remain a significant part of that coalition. Recent work has indicated that traditional Muslims show a preference for the Democratic Party (Barreto & Bozonelos, 2009; Gallaher, 1997; Wald & Calhoun-Brown, 2007), the party of the cultural progressives. This preference likely emerged as these Muslims perceived less acceptance from the “war on terrorism” dialog emerging among political conservatives. 248 || Notes to pp. 14–19 3 Information about the history of these organizations was obtained by visiting the home pages of each organization and reading about their history in their own words. Those homepages are http://ffrf.org for Freedom From Religion Foundation, http://atheists.org for American Atheists, and http://www.jewsonfirst.org for Jews On First. 4 For example, it is hard to imagine that a popular and successful television producer such as Norman Lear would have difficulty finding wealthy individuals to contribute to his organization. While this is merely one example of a wealthy benefactor for cultural progressive movements, the demographical information in our research indicates that many other individuals with significant financial means are active within cultural progressive movements. 5 We realize that this statement will offend prolifers, who do not see the fetus as part of a woman’s body, and prochoicers, who do not see the fetus as a baby. Our reaction to such offense is, so be it. We are not taking sides in the abortion debate but merely pointing out the different claims made by both groups in this debate. Representing the perspectives of either side in a way in which the members of that side will recognize their own arguments is likely to make the adherents on the other side angry, and there is nothing that can be done about that. 6 There are obvious conceptual differences between the idea of a Christian right and the idea of a religious right. The term Christian right implies that a group may have hostility directed specifically at Christians , while the term religious right brings in conservatives of other religious faiths. But while there are conservative Jews and Mormons active in the religious right, Christianity is still the dominant religion in the United States and thus has the overwhelming influence in conservative religious politics. Even Jewish religious conservatives such as Michael Medved and Dennis Prager are quick to defend Christianity against secular opponents. Thus, in many ways the Christian right is synonymous with the religious right. 7 Our question assessing social networks used the term born-againChristians , while our thermometer questions ask about fundamentalists. We used fundamentalist in the latter questions since that is the standard term used in most of the thermometer studies we have found. But we did decide to use born-again in our other question since we were unsure if the respondents conceptualized what a fundamentalist was at the age of 15, whereas born-again is a more common term. 8 Our basic style is to use several quotes to back up most of our points. We do this first because the sheer number of our respondents provided us with many examples but also produced the possible charge that we are cherry-picking our data for some preconceived result. Using several quotes indicates the accuracy of our statements about the data. This is especially true given that many of the quotes could be used to Notes to pp. 49–71 || 249 illustrate several of the points made throughout this book, reinforcing the patterns that we claim are present in the data. Second, we do this to provide a reader with the tone that many of the respondents set for their answers. It is one thing to tell the reader about the perspectives of the respondents, but quite another...