Culture Wars The Struggle to Define America by James Davison Hunter (z-lib.org)

132 THE NEW LINES OF CONFLICT

Catholics, Jews, and secularists share more in common with each other culturally and politically than they do with the orthodox members of . their oum. faith tradition (and vice versa)-then the practical effects of the birth of Christianity and the Reformation have, at least in the U.S. context, become both politically and ·culturally defunct.

If the organizing principle of American pluralism has shifted in these ways, then, it is because another world-historical "event" has he- me paramount. Yielding to the temptation of hyperbole, it could be 1d that the politically relevant divisions in the American context are nger defined according to where one stands vis-a-vis j esus, Luther, alvin, but where one stands vis-a-vis Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, and especially their philosophical heirs (including tzsche and Rorty). The politically .relevant world-historical event, in

th~ Enlightem:nent with its rejection of otherworldly "superstitions" and its emphasis on societal progress through human mastery over nature and rational judgment. Eyen the mast Bible-belieying Evangelical, the most Rome-bound Catholic-and t:be most nhseryant Orthodox Jew has beec..influenced in subtle eyep if unacknowledged ways. What really divJdes our culture is the W-&iCT of priori')' tbe &BMees HPstl -u~ different moral communities rel most in establishin their own sense of ng t and wrong. early there are people at each extreme, particular y those who act as voices for opposing communities. There are also, as we recogn,ized in chapter I, many people somewhere in the middle, who draw in varying degrees from both Enlightenment and biblical sources of moral understanding. (The fate of the "middle"-the majority of Americans-will be discussed in chapter 6.) Still, as a historical event, the Enlightenment has become an increasingly prominent source of division in American public life. The division is certainly "religious" or cultural, but it has unmistakably political consequences too. Already these have begun to take expression as new forms of prejudice, discrimination, social strife, and political conflict.

Ill

CULTURAL WARFARE

5

The Discourse of Adversaries

The demand for moral clarity in the larger public order issues from a wide variety of sources. First, there is a certain requirement for commonly held ideals to sustain national identity. There is also a practical need for a universal system oflaw and justice. Not least is a strong public desire for a common heritage within which to educate succeeding generations of children. All of these factors, as well as others, create extraordinary pressure to find and maintain commonly held symbols-the symbols that make collective life possible.

As has been seen already, the realignment in American public culture entails a deep division that centers around what those symbols will be and the way they are to be interpreted. It goes without saying that this realignment involves more than' a passive ideological gerrymander- ing-the redrawing of ideological boundaries and affinities around dif-. ferent political and even philosophical issues. The realignment has brought about not only subterranean friction in public culture but open conflict. But what is the nature of that conflict? How does it take form and expression? This chapter examines the tone and the temper of the conflict; so doing ~l make it possible to see more clearly what is ~ti­ mately at stake in the realignment of American public culture.

136 CULTURAL WARFARE

DISCREDITING THE OPPOSITION

l'.be 5tr11ggle rg ipstjtJ1tjpnalize...a partjc11lar yjsiop gf Ration~ and purpose is always an effort to gain the widest public approval pos- sible-in a word, to achieve legitimation. Basically, two strategies, one

and debate, as o osmg ac ions aruculate their ideals for "the wa thin s should be:"-By groun mg e ng tness or legitimacy of their claims in logic, science, _humanitarian concerns, or in an appeal to tradition or God, c;ach side endeavors to persuade its opponents, as well as all others who might listen, of the superiority. of its claims. Such is the ideal of

itive moral argument IS Slmp y msllffiC:lentasa way Of achievi1_1g any rea)

~~~~~~~~e;go~~o~si~ti~o~n~-~I~n~~oiher-words,..oecause each side op-

erates-out o a funamenta y 1 erent conception of moral authority, because each side uses a radically different measure of moral sensibility, because each side employs a markedly different kind of moral logic, neither side will ever be able to persuade the other of the superiority of its own claims. Positive moral argument may have some sway over the ambivalent, but by itself it would not go very far toward inaugurating a new moral crusade; alone it could never have much effect on shifting the weight of popular opiniori in favor of one cause and against its

its own; indeed, neutralizing the opposition through a strategy of public ridicule, derision, and insult has become just as important as making credible moral claims for the world that each side champions. Arguably, this negative persuasion has become even more important, for in public

. discourse, "dialogue" has largely been replaced by name calling, denunciation, and even outright intolerance. In the wor s of the old adage,

Historical Antecedents

just .as the divisions in contemporary public life have certain precedents, so too the hostility shared by each side of the contemporary cultural divide is not entirely novel. In 1927, for example, the president of the Science League of America wrote a spirited polemic on the relationship between Christian Fundamentalism and modern science, and declared that "in the United States today there exist, side by side, two opposing cultures, one or the other of which must eventually dominate our public institutions, political, legal, educational, and social. On the one side we· see arrayed the forces of progress and enlightenment, on the other the forces of reaction, the apostles of traditionalism. There can be no compromise between these diametrically opposed armies."1

The clash to which he was referring, however, was already more than a century old. Indeed, antecedents to the contemporary antagonism appeared soon after the founding of the new republic, in the antagonism between Evangelical pietists and organized deism, in the Evangelicalbased hysteria over the so-called conspiracy of the Illuminati.2 Similar hostility arose in the Evangelical-based, anti-Masonic movement of the early to mid-1800s.8 Bitter precursors to the contemporary secular resentment against orthodoxy also existed through the early nineteenth century.4 The belligerence was mutual. Other, more comparable precedents to our present situation occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Against "Infidelity"

Hostility toward religious iOfidelity and irreligion was voiced by Protestants and Catholics alike. Although Protestants and Catholics recognized the prevailing influence of Christianity, it was considered that there was already enough sin in American society and the situation would only get worse if atheism were to prevail.5

From the perspective of many traditionalists, the further introduction of sinful ideas was precisely what happened in the last decades of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century in the contest between science and faith, between the evolutionary and creationist views of human origins. The organizational efforts by Protestant Fundamentalists (and some Catholics) to dam the flow of

138 CULTURAL WARF.ARE

these intellectual currents made the contest a national issue.6 Behind these efforts was a profound hatred of modernism in all of its forms.

ing short of a "relentless warfare [with] Evolution and Modernism."7 The intensity of rancor felt by Fundamentalists toward those who propagated modernist ideas was expressed sharply by one clergyman from North Carolina when he called them '1ackass preachers without faith," a "gang [that) consists of newspaper editors and scientists, who should be exiled out of our country for insulting the high moral standard of the creation of human life, Christianity and civilization, for they are not one hundred percent American, but an insane set of ig.1orant, educated fools, who insist on lowering their own organic life to that of a monkey or animal. Take a jackass, a hog and a skunk and tie them together and you have a scientific evolutionist or a Modernist."8 An editorial published in the Los Angeles Examiner in 1923 voiced similar views: "Take the evolutionists, infidels and no-hell teachers out somewhere and crucify them, head downward, and we will have a better country to live in and, instead of these evolution and easy-way ideas, teach people the Word of God to go by, and all will be well."9

.Why such animosity? For one, such intellectual currents, especially the ideas of evolution, were seen as "utterly false." As one Clergyman put it, "Scientific statements on the descent of man and survival of the fittest are simply camouflage for infidelity."10 Because the liberal view of Scripture and of religious tradition was false it was also, in the words of a resolution made by a Baptist congregation in Arkansas in 1926, "dangerous, deceptive and destructive to the cause of Christianity."11 Two weeks before the Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, the author of the state bill outlawing the teaching of evolution stated a similar opinion in the New York Times:

I regard evolution to be the greatest menace to civilization in the world today. It goes hand in hand with modernism; makes Jesus Christ a faker; robs the Christian of his hope and undermines the foundation of our ·~government of the people, for the people and

by the people." People are free in this q>Untry to worship God as they please but they are not free to do everything that the devil wants done. 12

A Lutheran pastor went even further in describing the ill effects of modernist thinking, when he declared that

liberalism wrecked Eden's happiness and perfection; it condemned Jesus to the death on the cross; it fought the spread of Christianity from the start. Less than 400 years after the first Pentecost, liberalism nearly succeeded in destroying the soul of Christianity. It came down like a blight on the fruits of the Reformation; it has caused in part the large number of divisions by which the visible church is rent. It is the source of present-day crime waves. 19

Animosity toward liberal and secularistic tendencies in religion and academia remained clamorous through the 1920s, and continued through the 1950s, though as American Fundamentalism retreated from public visibility, so too its hostility toward the forces that had caused it fell from public attention. There were a few exceptions, of course. In the 1920s and 1930s, Gerald B. Winrod accused modernists of "shar[ing] more basic principles with atheism than with orthodox Protestantism."14 In the 1930s, Billy Sunday denounced modernists as "evolutionary hot-air merchants." And in the 1940s, James M. Gray of the Moody Bible Institute argued that modernism was a prelude to "the red doctrine of the Third International."15 Reverend Carl Macintyre, the founder of the antimodernist American Council of Christian Churches (1941) and ally of Senator Joseph McCarthy, relentlessly attacked liberal Protestantism through the 1940s and 1950s. "A man who calls himself a modernist," he wrote, "is not a Christian." Modernists "are infidels, and must be forever tagged as such." Pointing to the leaders of the "liberal" Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., he claimed, "These men are not Christians.... They are no more Presbyterian than the Devil himself." The Federal Council of Churches, he said, promoted "apostasy." For Macintyre, modernism was nothing shortof"paganism," a "treason to the cause of Christ." Thus, the struggle between Fundamentalism and modernism was really "the struggle between belief and unbelief-between [true] Christianity and paganism." Through vigilance, "the stealth and stupidity of [the] enemy [would] be exposed."16

The language and themes of malice toward "infidelity" and "irre-

ligion," then, have been persistent within the Evangelical wing of orthodoxy. But the champions of Enlightenment rationality never suffered silently. Progressive voices within organized religion and the voices of more militant secular rationalists reciprocated throughout the decades.

Against "Theocracy"

Althou h organized deism as a self-conscious movement declined

as Rehert "J?agan Bob" Ingersoll.,,,ntil he retired in 1899, Ingersoll was one of the greatest orators of the Gilded Age, especially noted for his diatribes against traditional religion. Ingersoll, a great admirer of Thomas Paine, accused organized and or.thodox religion of keeping people both physical and mental slaves to a dead dogma. 18 Speaking to established religion, Ingersoll wrote,

You have imprisoned the human mind; you have been the enemy of liberty; you have burned us at the stake-wasted us upon slow fires-torn our flesh with iron; you have covered us with chainstreated us as outcasts; you have filled the world with fear; you have taken our wives and children from our arms; you have confiscated our property; you have denied us the right to testify in courts of justice; you have branded us with infamy.... In the name of your religion you have robbed us of every right; and after having inflicted upon us every evil that can be inflicted in this world, you have fallen upon your kriees, and with clasped hands implored your God to torment us forever. 19

In contrast, Ingersoll claimed, "The doubter, the investigator; the Infidel, have been the saviors of liberty."20

The unbroken thread of liberal and secularist criticism of orthodox religion escalated as the Fundamentalist-modernist controversy emerged in the early twentieth century.21 By this time its popular bas~ of support was widening. No longer the fulminations of freethinkers and Unitarians, such criticism of authoritarian religion became the stock of nearly all progressively minded intellectuals. By the time Sinclair Lewis had published his tale of the odious preacher Elmer Gantry in 1927, the images of the hypocrite, the swindler, the charlatan, and the bigot had already become an established part of the Fundamentalist stereotype.

But the public image of Fundamentalists portrayed by modernists and secular intellectuals went beyond this as well. All Southern conservative Protestants came to be identified as "religious zealots," even "barbarians"; their culture came to be linked with "militant ignorance"; and their worries about cultural change were viewed as a "sinister movement" marked by a "propaganda of intolerance, hatred, bigotry and viQlence" within which lay the potential for "another bloody, terrible Inquisition."22 In The War on Modern Science (1927), Maynard Shipley wrote,

The forces of obscurantism in the United States are in open revolt.... The armies of ignorance are being organized, literally by the millions.... If the self-styled Fundamentalists can gain control over our state and national governments-which is one of their avowed objectives-much of the best that has been gained in American culture will be suppressed or banned, and we shall be headed backwards toward the pall of a new Dark Age.25

The prospects were "alarming." He wrote, "If the Fundamentalist forces can gain control of our political and judicial institutions, our country will ere long be converted into a relentless Fundamentalist theocracy, under which religious and academic freedom will eventually be totally suppressed."24 The "peril to our modern civilization," though, was not just a possibility for the future. It was a present danger. As another individual announced (referring to the effects of the Scopes trial), "The church is the Rock of Ages blocking the road to enlightenment. We must make our schools safe from theocracy."25 Another modernist preacher put the matter even more bluntly: "Religious zealots barricade the road of progress, put out the.eyes of i11telligence, mutilate learning and nail reason to the cross."26

Yet in the works of the literary and social critic H. L. Mencken, Fundamentalist bashing became something of an art form. For him, the ultimate enemy of American civilization was the Puritan; he wrote to a colleague in 1916, "My :whole life, once I get free from my present engagements, will be devoted to combatting Puritanism."27 Mencken called Fundamentalists "yokels," "half-wits," "hillbillies," "peasants," "gaping primates," "anthropoid rabble," "morons," and "Babbitts." He called their ministers "shamans," "militants," "inquisitors," "one-horse Popes," "amateur Messiahs," "the most ignorant class of teachers ever set up to guide a presumably civilized people," and their beliefs "nonsensical," "degraded nonsense," "malignant imbecility," a "childish the-

ology" that was "cunningly rolled in sugar and rammed down unsuspecting throats." His attacks on William Jennings Bryan, the champion of Fundamentalism at the Scopes trial, were particularly savage.

·uthe fellow [Bryan] was sincere, then so was P. T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without shame or dignity.... [At Dayton] he seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the barnyard. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.... [To his Fundamentalist followers], he was the peer of Abraham.... Bryan made the grade. His place in Tennessee hagiography is secure. If the village barber saved any of his hair, then it is curing gall-stones down there today.28 ·

Of course, this attack was not lev~led so much at Bryan himself as it was at what Bryan represented. Mencken's venomous satire reflected the judgment of an entire generation of progressively oriented church people and secular iotellectuals.

As Fundamentalism retreated from public visibility beginning in the late 1930s so too did the counterattacks. Yet the animosity lay just beneath the surface of public dialogue. The mainline periodical Christian Century tended to ignore much of Fundamentalism, but when it did address such issues, the journal claimed that dispensationalism was not only "pagan" and "extremist," but also a "neurotic" movement allied with "reactionary" capitalists.29 The "emotional fundamentalist Protestantism" that "dominates the Bible belt" was criticized for "aid[ing] the fascist effort." "This type of religion," Harry F. Ward wrote in the Century, "thrives on war and the disasters that follow war."30 Particularly vituperative were the Century's attacks on the Fundamentalism of Carl Macintyre, who through his "baseless and deliberately deceptive charges" spawned a "hate campaign" against American religion, creating

"religious discord and tumult."31

.,...___

A Motif for the Present!

Both sides, then, have long sought to undermine each other's credibility and legitimacy in the public realm. In this legacy there is much that speaks to the present. The contours of past antagonisms parallel