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

Cultural Conflict

In America

The various conflicts presented in the prologue, and the lives that give them flesh and blood, will not be totally strange to most Americans. All of these stories; and the particular voices that tell them, relate to larger issues that are widely recounted on the front pages of newspapers and weekly news and opinion magazines, in the accounts and commentaries of television news anchors, and in the topical dialogue of radio talk-show celebrities: "I have 'Alan' from Blue Ash, Ohio, on the line. Our question tonight is, Should there be a Constitutional amendment prohibiting flag burning in America? What is your view, Alan?" The stories themselves and, more importantly, the issues that underlie them are the topics of dispute at the corporate cocktail party and the factory cafeteria alike, in the high school civics classroom, in the church lounge after the weekly sermon, and at the kitchen table over the evening meal. Few of us leave these discussions without ardently voicing our own opinions on the matter at hand. Such passion is completely understandable. These are, after all, discussions about what is fundamentally right and wrong about the world we live in-about what is ultimately good and what is finally intolerable in our communities.

The views of the six people presented in the previous dispatches illustrate only a few of the voices heard in public debate today. Yet their few stories nevertheless show that the debates on these issues are not made up simply of abstract and disembodied statements but express views rooted in real lives unfolding in real communities all across the

32 INTRODUCTION

nation..The voices heard here, as well as those that make up the larger forum of public debate and discussion in America, cannot be easily caricatured; in the details, each point of view is novel, indeed incom- . parable.

Though these voices are distinctive, they are not, in the end, extraordinary. Indeed, they share much that is common and familiar within American life, echoing thoughts and themes that resonate with many of our own experiences. All six people are basically middle-class Americans who are actively involved in their own neighborhoods and cities. In each case, their involvement is born out of a deep concern for the character of life-first and foremost in the .Places where they live, but also very much within the country as a whole. Each of them was able to draw out the implications of the particular controversy at hand for the character of life in the nation. In the very best sense of the term, then, each is a responsible and engaged citizen; words and phrases such as truth,justice, the public good, and national purpose have important personal meanings for them.

Looking at their backgrounds and current careers, it would be inaccurate to call any of these people "intellectuals." It is certainly fair to say, however, that they are all philosophically or religiously reflective. All would recognize that their own lives and world views form part of a larger community of moral understanding and commitment that is distinct from yet integrated within their involvement in neighborhood, city, and region. For Chuck Mcllhenny, that community of moral commitment is the Reformed wing of Evangelical Christianity; for Richmond Young, it is a Catholic fellowship within a gay subculture; for Yehuda Levin, it is the traditional world of Orthodox Judaism; for Bea Blair, it is the social justice wing of mainline Protestantism; for Mae Duggan, it is, as she put it, "old-fashioned" Catholicism; and for Harriet Woods, it is the policy establishment of secular liberalism. These attachments are singularly important: all six find themselves thrust into controversy and into long-term community involvement not because they are quarrelsome by nature but rather because their prior moral commitments"""-to what they personally believe is true, just, good, and in the public in- terest-have compelled them to become involved. Chuck's calling as an Evangelical Christian; Richmond's commitment as a liberal Catholic; Yehuda's obligations a~ an Orthodoxjew; Bea's responsibility as an Episcopal clergywoman; Mae's commitment to the imperatives of traditional Catholic teaching; and Haniet's allegiances to the humanistic ideals of stewardship to the human family-these commitments oblige them to

CULTURAL CONFLICT IN AMERICA

33

speak out as thc:;y do. Remove these cpmmitments and you take away that which ·engages them as neighoors and citizens; separate them from these understandings _and you take away their hearts and souls.

On his or her own terms, we find each of the six individuals profiled to be reasonable, engaging, and even appealing. In the details of their lives they are so normal and human: they all have great qualities as well as a few quirks, high and noble hopes as well as deep worries, personal triumphs as well as disappointments. Yet this personal and human face of public debate is' one we rarely if ever see. In most cases, our sources of information about the controversies of the day are the media of ~ass communications: the radio and television, the daily newspaper and the weekly news magazine. By their very nature, these media can only give superficial coverage; they are incapable of delving into or rising above the personalities and events of the moment. As a consequence, the individuals who inspire various forms of social action tend to be presented as extremists, demagogues, and even opportunists for their own personal causes and special interests. Angry at what they see as injustice, they have decided to stand defiantly against what seem to be the givens of history. Likewise, the events themselves tend to be presented as flashes of political insanity-spasmodic symptoms of civic maladjustmentagainst the routine conduct of public affairs. Such events are rarely related to one another, but appear to be merely "disparate" outbursts by disparate (and sometimes "desperate") individuals and groups. Commentators make little effort to explain and interpret these stories and the issues that underlie them, to place them in a broader frame of reference. Those who do present events as interrelated often raise the specter of a dark and shadowy conspiracy. Most Americans reply, "Bosh!" to conspiracy theories-and they do so quite rightly. Yet they also, perhaps unwisely, tend to overlook the possibility that these "disparate" events may nevertheless be related to each other in complex and important ways.

The question we face is simply this: What if these events are_ not just flashes of political madness but reveal the honest concerns of different communities engaged in a deeply rooted cultural conflict? What if the voices of public argument-the Mcllhennys and Youngs, the Levins and Blairs, the Duggans and Woodses-are not just the cranky utterances of America's political fringe but the articulation of concerns that are central to the course and direction of the mainstream of American public culture?

The argument of this book is that these voices and events are related

34 INTRODUCTION

to each other in complex ways-that Ame;: ~the midst of a culture
w:r that has had and wm contjpue t;Jtll¥8	A	atiees eel 9A&;·liithin

publFc policy hut wjthjn the liyes of ordinary Americans everywhere. In understanding the character of this· conflict, we will see that important differences often separate the personal from the public. As Chuck and Richmond, Yehuda and Bea, and Mae and Harriet have shown us, ~

	·	lture war are dee and		rhaps
			· ed and aggravate
the	way thi;'are esented in	lie. In bri	e media technolo	a
11.!a	es pubbc speech possible gives public discourse a life and logic ~

i~wn, a life and logic separated from the inteqtjops of the speaker or · the subtleties of arguments they employ. --:·· ~ In this book we will also see just h~w high the stakes of this war are.

They reach far beyond the biographies of those who give voice to conflicting concerns, and far beyond the immediate policy outcomes news media accounts describe. At stake is how we as Americans will order our lives together.

An Absence of Categories

How are we to make sense of all this? Certainly there are disagreements from time to time about matters of community interest and even of public policy. These are to be expected. Yet a "culture war" in America? The very thought or possibility of a deeply rooted and historically pivotal cultural conflict in America strains our imagination.

Our difficulty in coming to terms with the idea of such a conflict in contemporary America arises largely from the absence of conceptual . categories or analytical tools for understanding cultural conflict. We simply lack ways of thinking about the subject. The predominant images of contemporary cultural conflict focus on religious and cultural hostilities played out in other parts of the world: the suppression of the Kurds in Iraq; the struggle of Sikh nationalists to establish their own homeland in northwest India; the political offensive of Gush Emunim, the political organ of Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, in its efforts to maintain the purity of orthodoxy in a pluralistic society; and the continuing hostilities between the Hindu Tamil minority and the Sinhalese Buddhist majority in northern Sri Lanka. As vivid and arresting as these images may be, they are foreign to the everyday experience of most Americans, distant from us both spatially and culturally. Thus, few Americans can relate

CULTURAL CONFLICT IN AMERICA

35

personally, much less passionately, to the interests and concerns these images represent.

These images should not be seen as so remote, however, for they can provide metaphors for our thinking about religious and cultural conflict in our country. Of course, the particular cast of cultural players on the American scene is different from those found in other countries. Likewise, the character of the actual cultural conflict played out in the United States is very distinctive. Nevertheless, the story underlying cultural conflict in numerous places throughout the world-a story about the struggle for power-resonates with narratives found in America's not-so-distant past. An understanding of that past is essential for coming to terms with the unfolding conflict of the present.

CULTURAL CONFLICT: THE AMERICAN STORY

The memory need only be prodded lightly to recall that Protestant hostility toward Catholicism (and, to a far lesser extent, Catholic resentment · of Protestantism) provides one of the dominant motifs of early modern American histo?:t:-1 I Inderstandjng the American experience even as late as the nineteenth century re ires an under t d' critical role {?layed by anti-Catholicism in shaping the character of politics, pub IC education, the media, and sociai reform.

Of course, the mutual hostility of Protestants and Catholics had been implacable since the time of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth century. For their rejection of church tradition and ecclesiastical authority, Protestants were regarded by Catholics as infidels who had abandoned the true faith; for their elevation of"arcane rituals" to the status of scriptural truth and for their elevation of papal authority to the status of the authority of Christ, Catholics were regarded by Protestants as heretics who had perverted the true faith.

Needless to say, these tensions were not only religious or theological in nature. Indeed, the split between Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation generated one of the most enduring and consequential political divisions in Western experience. More than a century (between 1559 and 1689) of religious warfare within and among the nations of Western Europe can be attributed to these _interreligious hostilities. And even after the age of religious wars had formally come to an end, the political tensions between these religious and cultural traditions contin-

36 INTRODUCTION

ued to affect the institutj.onal fabric of Western life. Prejudice, discrimination, and even physical violence were commonplace for the Protestant minorities in southern Europe (France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal) and the Catholic minorities in the north (Britain, Germany, Holland, and Scandinavia).

America, of course, was colonized primarily by emigrating European Protestants of one stripe or another. It is not surprising, then, that antiCatholic sentiment emigrated to American shores as well, and became woven into the unofficial political and cultural traditions of the colonists. In fact, anti-Catholicism in America reached something of an apex in the nineteenth century. For one, many of the major urban daily newspapers displayed a prominent anti-Catholic prejudice: the Chicago Tribune, for example, played a significant role in inciting anti-Catholic agitation through the 1840s and 1850s.2 There was also an enormous literature exclusively devoted to discrediting the Catholic presenc~

tween 1800 and 1860 American e ·	.	ublished at	5 daily,
y, or bimonthly newspapers and 13 monthly or quarter!			ma azines
while American	u	1s m houses	· e

more than 200 anti-Catholic books.3 The most titillating and popular of this literature presented accounts of priests and nuns who had abandoned their faith because of their experiences of torture, mental brutality, and even sexual offense. One of the first and certainly the most famous of these accounts, Maria Monk's .4.wful Disclosures ofthe Hotel15"ieu Convent. 'f'he Sel1tl3 uf 11lm1i. Nunnery Revealed (183i>[sold aver 300,000 copies. Others published around the same time inciu':ied Rebecca Re~ ~ths in a Convent (1835), Rosamond Culbertson's A Narrative of the Captivity and Sufferings of an American Female Under the Popish Priests in the Island of Cuba, with a Full Disclosure ofHer Manners and Customs (1836), Andrew Steinmetz's The Novitiate, or a Year Among the English Jesuits (1846), and Josephine Bunkley's The Testimony of an Escaped Novice from the Sisterhood of St; Joseph ( 1856). The Protestant suspicion and fear that fueled widespread interest in these tales formed a pretext for riots in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Louisville, and other cities east of the Mississippi, as well as numerous attacks on convents, churches, and seminaries (such as the burning of the Ursuline Convent of Charlestown in Boston in 1834, and of St. Michael's Church and St. Augustine's Church in Philadelphia in 1844).4

Anti-Catholicism also ignited the great school wars of the midnineteenth century, visible in Philadelphia and Boston but particularly in New York, due to the outspoken views ofJohn Hughes, an Irishman

CULTURAL CONFLICT IN AMER.I CA

37

and the presiding bishop in that city. Because skills, values, and habits of life are passed on to children in school, it was inevitable that the schools would be an arena of cultural conflict, where the majority would assert its power and minority cultures would struggle to maintain a voice. Despite advocates' claims that the common schools of New York were nonsectarian, the Public School Society of New York retained te"Xtbo6ks

that contai			·	·	and anti-Catholic stat~
T~also main	·	the	ractic		dail readin and rec1ta 1	f
th_<:_ (Protestant) King Iames version of the Bible. When the Public c						I
<societ refused	to	ccomm	e Catholic interests either by allowing
Q.;i.tholic religious jn5trnction after hrnirs or· by pmyjdjng public unds
to be.		establishment of		ublic schools of a Catholic n"iture,
the Catholic community suffered.
Yet" perhaps the most roaferous					expressions of anti-Catholicism

came from anti-Catholic societies (such as the American Protestant Association, the Christian Alliance, the American and Foreign Christian Union, the American Protective Association, and American Alliance) and anti-Catholic political parties (such as the Native American parties of the

·1840s, the Know-Nothing party of the 1850s, and the Republican party of the 1850s and 1860s). Importantly, these organizations were most successful in precisely the states where Catholics were most numerous. Thus, they became significant not only for organizing and voicing both popular and elite resentment against Catholics but for mobilizing electoral opinion against the interests· of a rapidly expanding Catholic community that remained both severely disadvantaged and largely powerless.

But Catholics are not the only religious minority that has endured hardship in America. The memory only needs to be prodded a bit further to recall the ways in which interreligious hostility has extended to Judaism. Christianity has long held Jews in the ambivalent status of being both God's chosen people, who had been miraculously sustained throughout the generations, and an unfaithful people who suffered deservedly for their betrayal of the Messiah. This was no less true for the Evangelical pietism that prevailed through the nineteenth century. In America, the remnants of Puritan culture retained a deep sympathy with the "People of the Book" and an identification with the Old Testament imagery of a people "in covenant with God." Still, in their view, the sufferings of the diaspora were the just punishments Qf a vengeful God for a people who had rebelled against His purposes.

Yet while the religious component was never absent, the secular and

38	INTRODUCTION

specifically economic behavior of Jews received the most vicious exploitation in stereotypes. Jews were portrayed as crude, aggressively greedy Shylocks whose conduct in business was always opportunistic and very often unscrupulous. Jews were the pawnbrokers, petty white-collar criminals, and merchants of the big cities, perennially i.n pursuit of th.e barg~in and conspicuous in their display of new wealth. Such was the imagery presented in popular dramas featuring Jews {like Melter Moss in The Ticket-of-Leave Man [1864], Mo Davis in Flying Scud [1867], Dicey Morris in After Dark [1868], and Mordie Solomons in The Lottery of Life [1867]). Popular novels of the period echoed the theme; at least three of Horatio Alger's stories, for exampie, containJews of this cast as minor characters.5. The portrait was reinforced throughout P,ozens of inexpensive and sensationalized dime novels written at the end of the century. Herman Stoll, the unscrupulous German-Jewish Wall Street broker in Albert Aiken's The White Witch (1871) and the shady operator Aaron Mosenstein in Aiken's Dick Talbot and the Ranch King (1892) are just two examples. Jews were similarly stereotyped in the works of Gilbert Jerome, Prentiss Ingraham, H.P. Halsy, and]. R. Coryell, the author of the popul.ar Nick Carter stories.6

-..;iHC~W...lll<il.'-J~IC4ll-9l!'-'l~laoii~lics. Nevpi:theless various fenu of anti-

Jewish discrimination did characterize the last two decades of the nineteen.th E@RlttFy &Rd the first three decades oftbe twentieth in partjculi.r.7 For Q,ne, quotas limited the admission ofJews to priyate schools, c91J.e.ges, and~s as late as the 1920s. As an upwardly mobile Jewish population began to migrate out of its ethnic and religious enclaves, restr_if!!ve covenants were plar..d .ID the de¢s of homes, tJ}lowing real

estate a		refuse to rent apartments to ews and I		han
. "	t" signs with the addendum "No Jews." T~d
to members 1		m social clubs and	e e 'o ment of summer and
weekend res~ts. At Saratoga, Manhattan Beach, and Coney				s an , 1

fue Catskills and other resorts throughout New York and New Jersey, placards were raised that stated, "No Jews or Dogs Admitted Here."J!L

retaliation, Jews purchased several resti ·ous otels i		he resort
towns an or	e1r own elite clubs in New York, Baltimore, Roch-

ester, Detr01t, and other ma"or Cities. In sum, the discriminatio; faced by ews in t e as ecades of the nineteenth century and the first decades

CULTURAL CONFLICT IN AMERICA

39

of the twentieth, while in many ways different from that experien~ed by the mainly Irish Catholics, was no less hostile. The net effect was to exdude and control.

Less visible motifs of cultural conflict in American history include hostility toward Mormons. From the founding of the Mormon Church in 1830, Mormons were subject to harassment and persecution. The governor of Missouri stated in 1838, "The Mormons must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the state, if necessary, for the public good.''8 And in several states, mainly in the South, they were. Joseph Smith and his brother were jailed and then killed by a mob in Illinois in 1844; four Mormon missionaries were killed by a mob in Cane Creek, Tennessee, in 1884; and numerous others became victims of murder, beatings, tar-and-featherings, and other acts of violence.9

In all of these instances cultural tension arose not simply from academic disagreement over the proper form of ecclesiastical structures or a theoretical argument over doctrinal truths. Rather, America's uneasy pluralism implied a confrontation of a deeper nature-a competition to define social reality. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth century cultural discord was kindled, in general, by two competing tendencies. On one hand, there was the quest on the part of various minority cultures to carve out a space in American life where they could each live according to the imperatives of conscience and the obligations of community without harassment or reprisal. Such a space would provide the base from which to expand their own legitimate interests as a distinct moral community. On the other hand, there was the endeavor of Protestants and a largely Protestant-based populism to ward off any challenges-to retain their advantage in defining the habits and meaning of American culture.

THE END OF AN AGE?

The conflicts involving Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Mormons are indeed a prominent part of the American heritage, and yet even these experiences are largely removed from contemporary American experience. The reason for this is that all signs would seem to point to a growing sense of tolerance among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews (as

' well as Mormons and others too).

One series of national surveys conducted between 1966 and 1984, for example, showed that strong prejudicial feeling both for and against

40 INTRODUCTION

different religious faiths declined. Neutrality (or what may actually be mutual indifference) among Catholics, Protestants, and Jews generally increased while antipathy towai:d various groups declined. 10 Another general indication of growing interreligious tolerance is found in the answers to questions about the suitability of presidential candidates who personally identify with one or another religious tradition. II\..! 958 one

of eve	·	5 ercent claimed to be opposed to a nominee
who was Catholic, but by 1987 that number a				ecr e	8
ent.	ikewise in 1958, 28 percent sa1		at t	ey wou d not vote	or

a ca§1date who ;;;as Jewish. By 1987, this figure had dropped t~ 1rO percent. 11

The research on anti-Semitism in post-World War II America points in the same direction. Once again, the trends point to a rapid decrease in the proportion of the population holding negative perceptions of Jews. 12 For example, non-Jews are now far less likely to believe that Jews "have a lot of irritating faults," or are "unscrupulous," or "more willing thar, others to use shady practices to get what they want," that they "always like to be at the head of things," or that they are "objectionable neighbors." Non-Jews are also now far less likely to believe that Jews "have too much power," that they "don't care what happens to anyon~ but their own kind," and that they "are more loyal to Israel than to America."

Fyen among white Eyan~Ucal Protestants, the sector of the population that has historically been most hostile to Je'\YS anti-Semitic feeling ~According to one survey conducted in 1986 for the AntiDefamanon League of B'nai B'rith, there is no longer any "strong direct evidence" to suggest that "most Evangelical Christians consciously use their deeply held Christian faith and convictions as justification for antiSemitic views ofJews."15 Indeed, 90 percent of the FmmseHcal1 disagreed

with	e statement that "Christians ar · ·			·	·	tive t-
	toward Jews sm	e	ews killed Christ,'		and less than one in
te	ee that	oesn t	ear the
concluded that many o		e negauve attitudes o			vangelicals toward

Jews are best interpreted as a measure of "general particularism" than of specific anti-Semitism per se. I!!deed, the study further noted that

"There isj5?!De evidence to suggest that Evangelic;al Christians ma,v"have 1!!9re positive attitudes toward Jews than [~r-9} other non-Chris~

·became the intCrrelationship he~n the Christian and Jewish tra-

of ---------

ditiga thre1:1gbout tA.e Qld and :llilew Testaments."....-

.The expansion of cultural tolerance, it is important to point out, is