Vox Blogoli - Co-opt them to tame them

Hugh Hewitt has issued the first Vox Blogoli challenge of the new year. It has to do with the following words from Jonathan Rauch in the Atlantic.

“On balance it is probably healthier if religious conservatives are inside the political system than if they operate as insurgents and provocateurs on the outside. Better they should write anti-abortion planks into the Republican platform than bomb abortion clinics. The same is true of the left. The clashes over civil rights and Vietnam turned into street warfare partly because activists were locked out of their own party establishments and had to fight, literally, to be heard. When Michael Moore receives a hero’s welcome at the Democratic National Convention, we moderates grumble; but if the parties engage fierce activists while marginalizing tame centrists, that is probably better for the social peace than the other way around.”

Hugh invites "comments on this passage, what it says about the author, The Atlantic, and the left's understanding of the Christian culture in America in 2005."

So sure, why not, I'll give it a go.  I may not have anything intelligent to say on it but that's never stopped me from speaking before.

First of all, a subscription is required to read the whole article and I don't subscribe to the Atlantic.  Therefore, I don't know the context.  The best I can do for context is to cite these words from the byline to the article:

A funny thing happened to many of the scholars who went out into the country to investigate the red-blue divide. They couldn't find it.

And then he begins the article with these words:

Have fear, Americans. Ours is a country divided. On one side are those who divide Americans into two sides; on the other are all the rest. Yes, America today is divided over the question of whether America is divided.

All right, I'm joking. But the joke has a kernel of truth. In 1991 James Davison Hunter, a professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Virginia, made his mark with an influential book called Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. The notion of a country deeply and fundamentally divided over core moral and political values soon made its way into politics; in 1992 Patrick Buchanan told the Republicans at their national convention that they were fighting "a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself." By 1996, in his singeing dissent in the gay-rights case Romer v. Evans, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia could accuse the Court of "tak[ing] sides in the culture wars," and everyone knew exactly what he meant.

And that's all I can give you by way of context.

Rauch begins with Hunter's famous book Culture Wars. One of Hunter's key points was that, in this culture war there are three groups of people.  Those on the extreme left, those on the extreme right and those in the middle who weren't extremely anything.  They were more "leaning" right or left, than being "extremely" right or left.

However, people in the middle are boring and they don't make for good TV.  So, the mainstream media always gravitates toward the extremists.  Thus, an implication was that the "culture war" looks worse on TV than it does in real life. He also implied that there are far more people in the middle than there are on the extremes and they spend their lives watching the missiles fly over their heads from both sides.

Further, Hunter argued, warriors on both side of these "culture wars" don't talk to each other, they talk past each other. Extremists have a vested interest in the conflict, they may have a constituency made up of people from the middle who lean toward them and expect them to fight for them.  Thus dialogue with their opponents won't do, defeat is the only acceptable option for dealing with an opponent.

Hunter said that, if we are to have any hope of ending these culture wars, we would have to stop talking past each other and start talking to each other.  There was more to it than that, but you get the basic idea.

It looks to me like Rauch has come up with a different idea for reducing the hostilities and taming the culture warriors - co-opt them.  Not that the left should try to co-opt the right, or vice versa, but the moderates on both sides need to co-opt the extremists.  They need to bring them into the fold and settle them down.

I saw something similar happen when I was a teenager.  We had a hot-headed fellow on the football team who got angry one day and said some things about the coaches he shouldn't have said.  He was promptly invited to leave and was also invited to watch the game from the student section that week. 

After he served his appropriate punishment the coach brought him back into the fold and helped him regain a position of leadership.  I thought he should have been kicked off the team, but the coach said that, sometimes guys like that will settle down if they are placed in positions of leadership, or at least given a track to run on that will lead to leadership.

Whether you agree with that approach or not, it seems to be what Rauch is suggesting.  Let's give these extremists on both sides some more socially acceptable avenues to let out their aggression.

Rauch's comments have a certain logic to them.  In retrospect, wouldn't it have been better for Paul Hill to write nasty letters to the editor or even debate abortionists than commit murder?

Yet therein lies a problem.  Rauch is advocating that the inmates be allowed to run the asylum.  He's advocating giving power to the extremists.  If he's right it may tame them, but what does it do the centrists.  The centrists then become identified with the extremists.

But then again that whole term "centrist" is bugging me here.  It seems to assume that there is no right and wrong in these debates, the main objective is civility and tolerance.

Count me as one in favor of civil discourse.  In a democracy there will always be those who disagree with one another and we've got to learn how to disagree without shooting one another.

Yet, and here I will identify myself as a neanderthal in the eyes of many, the notions of civility and centrism are being used to crowd out the idea of truth.  The abortion issue was mentioned by Rauch and that is an example of how this plays out.  Sure, let's be civil in our discourse about this, but let's not assume that there is no right and wrong on this matter.  If the fetus is a human being, as we pro-lifers claim, then no amount of civility in discourse can sway us from our commitment to protecting human life.

This may be a point Hugh was getting at in asking what this question reveals about the left's understanding of Christian culture.  Could it be that Rauch is equating religious conservatives with those who bomb abortion clinics?  Maybe it is.  I would like to do Mr. Rauch the courtesy of not assuming the worst about his position (that he believes all religious conservatives are ticking time bombs), yet I can't help but believe that there are many on the left who believe exactly that, even if Mr. Rauch doesn't (I can see I'm going to have to buy this copy of the Atlantic so I can understand things better).

The truth is that the number of religious conservatives who support violence is infitessimally small.  The overwhelming majority of religious conservatives who denounce abortion denounce those who bomb abortion clinics.

Painting with a broad brush that lumps all religious conservatives in with those who commit violence is a red herring that ultimately diverts attention from the ethical issues themselves. 

There is one other matter that this quote raises that I want to touch on briefly that may be a little uncomfortable for Christians, even though I am sure that this is not what Mr. Rauch had in mind.  He is basically looking for ways to tame Christians by mainstreaming them, in a sense.  in all fairness, he wants to do the same with Michael Moore, so in this quote we can't accuse him of only picking on Christians.

Yet, if Alan Wolfe is correct, we Christians have already been tamed.  My friend Bob at Mr. Standfast sent me a post of his recently that excerpted an interview with Alan Wolfe, author of The Tranformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith.  Among other things, the article said:

Wolfe wants evangelicals to realize just how deeply American culture has shaped them—far more so than the distinctives of their faith—and he admonishes them to celebrate instead of lament that fact. ...

Mr. Rauch wants American culture to shape the faith of religious conservatives, Wolfe says it already has.  This should act as a warning to us.  Whether it is the abortion bomber whose faith has been (mis)shaped by a culture of violence, the conservative evangelical who has politicized his faith, or the secret service Christian who has gone underground with his faith, the effect is the same - the roles have been reversed.  Instead of faith shaping culture, culture shapes faith.

Maybe the answer to all of this, for evangelicals, is to fight as hard as we can to hold on to our identity, not as members of a particular party or advocates of a particular agenda, but as aliens and strangers in the world.