Making Sense of the Culture Wars: The Core Issue is Religion

". . .Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" (Luke 12:56)

Americans are fundamentally a religious people. And we are currently engaged in an all-out moral and spiritual struggle for the soul of the nation. To reach any true understanding of these culture wars one has to see that religion is at the heart of each of what I think are the three major "trigger" issues. Those are the issues that trigger the biggest response on both sides of the struggle: abortion, the role of religion in public life, and homosexuality/homosexual marriage. If you want to get a rollicking argument going in any gathering of Americans, just make a strong out-loud statement about any of those issues!

G.K. Chesterton had it right when he said that America is a nation with the soul of a church. Proof of the fact that Americans are a fundamentally religious people is seen in the rather pathetic recent attempt of the Democratic Party candidates for President to "get religion," or to make public statements along the lines of "I really do have some deep religious convictions." (Well, thank you for sharing. We just knew all along that it must be true, but we really needed for you to be right up front and tell us!).

I used the word "pathetic" because the Democratic Party has been steadily painting itself into a corner for the last three or four decades, even during the Clinton electoral victories. The Democrats have been pandering for votes among primarily secularist groups that have arrayed themselves against the traditional religious mind-set, or worldview, of the majority of Americans. I refer to the ACLU activists; the MoveOn. org types; the homosexual activists and their supporters; the abortion-rights activists and their followers; the animal-rights and environmentalist whackos; those permanently on welfare (a shrinking number in recent years) and the welfare bureaucracy; most of the Hollywood crowd; the vast majority of the academic establishment at our colleges and universities; the majority of the print/radio/TV media; etc., etc. So, if these candidates are going to toe the Party line, they have created a nasty conflict for themselves. They can't publicly and openly take the positions of their backers on the cultural issues without alienating the majority of the moderate Americans, whose votes they need in order to get elected. On the other hand, if they move away from the positions of their backers on the big three of abortion, homosexuality and homosexual marriage, and the role of religion in public life, they have to 1) convince voters that they have genuine positions of conviction and that they're not just pandering for votes (one of Hilary's biggest problems) and 2) stake out positions of conviction on the issues that somehow still distinguish them from the Republican candidates, which is going to be extremely difficult for them to do. In other words, the Democrats are in a corner between the walls of principle and prudence, conviction and compromise.

It needs to be pointed out that some of the Republican candidates have similar problems with a basically religious electorate. Rudy Guliani may have played a heroic role on 9/11 as mayor of NYC, but his three marriages and his support of abortion disqualify him with most Americans. So also with Romney: is he now truly against homosexual marriage (he came out in support of it when he was running for governor of Massachusetts), or is he just flipping his position to get the Republican nomination? (Personally, I also suspect that the majority of the American people are not quite ready to put a Mormon in the White House). John McCain's nasty attacks on evangelical Christians in recent years are also well remembered by anybody that's been paying attention to public events.

You see, if you get down to the bottom of the barrel in our American culture wars, what you have is a war over religion. Most anti-religious secularists vote the Democratic ticket, but most Democrats are not secularists. We Americans are basically a religious people, so the real war is not one of religion vs. irreligion; the real war is over what our religion requires of us in terms of public policy, or how we are going to live together as a people.

Over the last four decades or so there has been a very gradual and almost imperceptible shift toward conservatism on the part of the American public. It used to be, in the 1930's and 1940's and even part of the 1950's, that a Rooseveltian liberalism held sway in our political life. Not any more. The spectacle of the 1960's Woodstock generation's stoned parties and Hanoi Jane type Vietnam War protests didn't sit well with the majority of Americans, and the resulting backlash has gradually evolved into a what is by now a normally conservative default position. In spite of what the media would have you believe, Kansas and Nebraska are more truly representative of how Americans think than California and Massachusetts.

And that's a big problem: The media is by and large so controlled by left-leaning folks that we don't get an accurate picture of how most Americans think. The polls, though, give us a much better view of who we are. They tell us, for example, that over 70% of us are against abortion, if you add up those against it after the first trimester, those against it for reasons other than rape and incest, and those against it at any time.

I want to lay out where I think the vast majority of us stand when it comes to the issues of public policy. In what follows I have in mind Americans who would describe themselves as "minimally religious" to "moderately religious." I am not necessarily talking about born-again, Spirit-filled Christians (though they certainly might agree), so I am not trying to describe my own positions. Recently, a woman said to me: "I'm a Christian, and I try to live a Christian life, but I don't take my religion as seriously as you do." Right she is about that! But, I think she represents the majority of Americans, so I'm going to describe what I believe is the thinking of that majority. So, this is not about me, though I'm sure that my own positions will be almost identical to what I am about to write.

Whether they consciously realize it or not, Americans' positions on the issues of the day are based on their religious beliefs, or their religious worldview.

Most Americans are patriotic. We believe that this nation is fundamentally good, the best country in the world. And when America takes action somewhere in the world, though we might make mistakes, our motives are right and we are a force for good. When we're trying to do the right thing in the world, we would like to have the support of other countries, but if we think we're right we're certainly not going to put it up for a vote---we're willing to go it alone if we have to. We don't really care if the UN is against us, and we're generally tired of paying most of their budget for the privilege of getting bashed there by two-bit diplomats.

We've always been in favor of defending America by force of arms, and although we hate wars and will try to avoid them, we're not basically anti-war. We are willing to go to war to win the freedom of others, provided our own national interest is at stake as well, because we believe that the God-given basic right of human beings to live in freedom is worth sending our young men into harm's way to attain. After all, we won our own freedom to exist as a nation by means of a war. We don't usually seek wars, but if we're attacked we believe in fighting back with everything we've got. Wars of choice are something pretty new for us (think Vietnam and Iraq; most of us aren't sure whether the Mexican and Spanish-American wars were or not), but if we find ourselves in one, we believe in fighting it through to victory. The word "empire" makes most of us nervous---we have never really wanted to have one, and we certainly don't think that we are one. We believe in a well-armed citizenry, because deep in our national psyche is the ancient notion that millions of farmers with rifles over their mantles will not easily lose their freedom to a dictator.

We Americans will tell you that we agree with the Declaration's statement that all human beings are created equal. Why? Most of us would probably say that's just the way God made people (God don't make no junk!). That means that we believe in equal opportunity for everybody to "make it" in life. But we don't think that people should be given special preference because of their skin color or their sexual behavior, or any other kind of personal characteristic. We just think that the playing field should be made level, so that everybody has an equal shot.

We believe that folks pretty much have to make their own way in life. Sure, the government needs to help people out sometimes, but we Americans have always felt that goverment's help needs to be a hand up, not just a hand out! Even if an individual or a family has to be on welfare for a while, the idea is to get them off it---to help them become productive and be able to support themselves. We just don't like the idea of a "Nanny State," that is, the government providing cradle to grave security. It just makes people dependent and wards of the state. It's not the American way. We emphatically reject the idea of the government redistributing wealth. That's Marxism---robbing the rich (read excessive taxation) to pay the poor. When it comes to matters of income, if there's a conflict between freedom and equality, we Americans will always choose freedom. We believe in equal opportunities, not necessarily equal results. We have never been a class society, so we don't hate the rich---we envy them---and want a chance to get there ourselves! We have always believed that anyone can make it in America with God's help, if they have a decent opportunity and the will to work hard. We believe in helping each other, and have proved over and over in situations like Hurricane Katrina that big government can't accomplish an iota of what caring neighbors and churches can do. We just basically don't trust big government, and don't think that the government is supposed to take care of people's needs all the time.

We believe fervently in free enterprise---being able to start your own business, and freely market your own products. Oh sure, there needs to be some regulation, so that the few bad actors can't foist unhealthy or unsafe products on the public. Of course we have to have taxes, because all those government services (police, fire, roads, schools, etc.) have to be paid for. But, people need to be free to own and develop their own property without government interference. And, from Day One on this continent, we Americans have always believed "the less taxes the better"---we want to be free to enjoy the fruits of our labors. As a general rule, then, we Americans have always agreed with Thomas Jefferson when he said: "The best government is that which governs least."

We Americans love children, and so we instinctively reject the business of killing babies through abortion. Though we think it might sometimes have to happen in extreme cases, we think that it needs to be severely restricted. Our majority national opinion has just about lined up with that of Lincoln in regard to slavery: stop the spread of it, restrict it whenever possible, and hopefully put it on the road to extinction.

We don't agree with homosexual marriage---anybody who understands anatomy can see that it's unnatural. God made everybody male or female, and marriage has always been between one man and one woman, and that's that. We certainly don't think homosexuals ought to be persecuted in any way, but neither do we think that they are entitled to special privileges just because they're homosexuals. They have all the same rights as the rest of us, and they don't need any more.

We're not upset when our politicians invoke God's blessings on America in their speeches. In fact, we're more upset if they don't mention God---we wonder if they're atheists. After all, God has blessed America down through the ages, and watched out for us, and it doesn't hurt to be reminded of it from time to time.

Most of us are Christians, and most of us go to church, though not usually every Sunday. We're not very denominationally minded, and we don't think any more highly of church bureaucracies than we think of government bureaucracies. Our religion tends to be more private these days, because with both husband and wife working and the kids' team practices and games, we have less and less time for "church stuff." Though we don't much trust TV preachers, and don't hold our priests and preachers in as much regard as we used to because of the scandals, it doesn't mean that we don't believe in Jesus and God any more. We do. We just aren't up for organized religion much any more.

When I look back over what I have written above, I have to say that my own personal viewpoints dove-tail with almost all of it. I would probably state things a bit stronger in certain places, and the last paragraph doesn't reflect my own situation. Lastly, I should add that I don't think abortion should be allowed for rape or incest either, though I don't for a second minimize the agony and pain involved.

All of the positions outlined above are based on a Judeo-Christian worldview, which is, of course, based on the Bible. In other words, the public policy viewpoints of the majority of the American people are religious at base. These are very much at variance with the viewpoints of the secularists in the culture wars. Up until now, at least, these secularists have been strongly influencing the policy positions of the Democratic Party.

The viewpoints of both conservatives and Christians are still the viewpoints of the majority of the American people. We Christians have not lost the culture wars---not yet, although the battle rages. No political candidate can succeed in running for national office in this country unless he or she is able to tap into that basic religious worldview, and use it as a base to mount a winsome, inspiring, and winning campaign. Woe to the candidate who does not understand this.

Copyright, 2007, Peter J. Marshall. All rights reserved.

This Article was published on 10/4/2007 and filed in Peter Marshall Columns and