Wednesday, March 09, 2005

The American War of Religion

James Nuechterlein's article, What's Right with Kansas, is a review of Thomas Frank's popular book, What's the Matter with Kansas: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Neuchterlein's review appears in the latest issue of First Things. First Things doesn't usually post their current content online, but I'm thankful that they decided to feature this article. I found it to be one of the most concise and incisive articles I've read, surveying the current divide between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans.

Here is an insightful section on the cultural/religious divide in the United States:

It is cultural issues that most divide the nation—and that most put Democrats at a disadvantage. Americans can (more or less) find common ground on economics and foreign policy, but, on cultural matters, they are radically at odds with one another. The differences in their realms of moral understanding go so deep as to make communication difficult. Their mutual incomprehension produces stereotypes of the other that range from the oversimplified to the truly vicious.

At its deepest level, this is a war of religion. Secularists vote heavily Democratic; those most regular in their religious observance vote disproportionately Republican. But that, as liberals point out, distorts the issue. Most secularists are Democrats, but most Democrats are not secularists. America is a religious nation, and our differences are not so much of religion vs. irreligion as they are of divergent understandings of what our religious commitments require of us politically. That is a complicated matter that defies easy summary, but it is a serviceable generalization that here, as in the culture at large, we pit liberal, mostly Democratic, modernists against conservative, mostly Republican, traditionalists.

These religious and moral differences play out in critical political controversies. Everyone agrees that Supreme Court appointments will be the most controverted issue of President Bush’s second term. That is because those appointments may well determine the outcome of everything from abortion to affirmative action to gay rights to religion in public life. (Experts on both sides present sophisticated jurisprudential arguments in defense of their positions, but most people look more to congenial outcomes than to consistent principles of law.)

These are the issues that try Democrats’ souls. In each case (abortion most complicatedly) their instincts lead them to the politically unpopular position. Artful finessing by artful candidates can go only so far: Democrats must sooner or later choose between principle and prudence. As with the culture, so, if less obviously, with politics in general. Today liberalism is not, as it was for so long, America’s default political position, and that transformation—effected so gradually that many people have missed it—means that Democrats are no longer the nation’s natural political majority.