A CULTURE DIVIDED Americas Struggle for Unity DAV.docx

A CULTURE
DIVIDED
America's Struggle for Unity
DAVID TREND
Paradigm Publishers
Boulder • London
A�tifURE DIVIDED
btiltural conformity. Indeed, to some theorists such an
obsession with
an articulated "common culture" has become synonymous with
the
integrity of national identity itself In this context then, the form
of
democracy we now face becomes "radical" in at least two senses
of
the term. Not only does it imply a fundamental rejection of
mono-
lithic party politics in favor of broader models based on identity
groupings, but it also suggests the rejection of a set of national
accords seen by many to constitute the very glue that holds. the
nation together. These two factors make possible the type of
new
spaces for engagement and new definitions of citizenship that

radical
democracy implies.
In other writings I have sought to delineate the problems pro-
duced by the binary epistemology of Enlightenment humanism
across a range of disciplinary fields: photography, film,
television,
education, music, and new media.18
The roots of this enlightenment model are perhaps nowhere
more
dearly articulated than in philosopher George W. F. Hegel's
phe-
nomenology, which mapped out a basic theory subject/object
rela-
tions. Hegel postulated an abstract dyad of the self and other,
constructed in the consciousness of individuals. Within this
idealized
rendering, the subject envisions an external object that it comes
to
recognize as different from itsel£ This difference produces a
dissatis-
faction that prompts the subject to absorb the attributes of the
exter-
nal other. He termed this process "sublation."19 According to
Hegel,
sublation was the motor force of human learning, as the subject
is
changed through the appropriatipn of new ideas and objects.
What is
important to remember is that this dialectic was a pure function
of
metaphysics. Although Hegel's fundamental subject/object
dualism
was replicated for many decades in western philosophies and
institu-

tions, it was not a model of the world--as contemporary
feminist,
poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories have made dear.
Indeed,
it is now increasingly evident that it is less productive to view
social
relations in binary "either/or" terms than in multiple "ands."
CHAPTER THREE
Belief
Faith in What?
I
N THE 2000s the topic of values reemerged in public discourse
as
a point of contention between liberals and conservatives, as
well as
a rallying call for moral absolutists. The values debate has
emerged
most strongly in debates over "good" and "evil" in people's
lives and
on the international stage. In the 2000 presidential race, George
W.
Bush ran on a platform of moral platitudes, echoed in his
victory
speech by imploring Americans to vanquish "evil" from the
world
and "teach our children values." 1 While President Barack
Obama has
expressed his values in more nuanced terms, Obama' s appeals
for
dialogue, tolerance, and responsibility convey a distinct moral
pro-

gram. All political agendas implicitly convey definitions of
"right"
and "wrong," imploring citizens to accept one set of such
definitions
over others. Framing issues of right and wrong in terms of good
and
evil intensifies the rhetoric of the discussion, evoking a
heightened
emotionalism and sometimes the specter of impending threat.
Throughout American history the nation's enemies frequently
have been portrayed as evil-and such characterizations often
have
underpinned rationales for military action and war. Franklin
Roose-
velt led the United States into World War II for the purpose of
fighting a great "evil." Ronald Reagan called America's Cold
War
enemies "the focus of evil in the world."2 This rhetoric again
went
into high gear following the attacks of September 11, 2001,
when
President Bush labeled Iran, Iraq, and North Korea an "axis of
evil." It would be easy to dismiss these remarks as simple
political
55
56 A CULTURE DIVIDED
posturing, lest we forget that George Bush won the presidency
twice and Republicans gained the support of many in other elec-
tions. The language of good and evil resonates powerfully in the
minds of voters because such concepts are deeply ingrained in

pub-
lic consciousness.
Concepts of good and evil are fundamental to Western philoso-
phy, dating to pre-Socratic times. In both Eastern and Western
phi-
losophy, these ideas are found at least as early as 500 BCE. The
philosophies of Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, and the
subse-
quent doctrines of Christianity all hinged on a fundamental
dualism
between the good or "the way" and evil or "falseness." Indeed,
orga-
nized religion has functioned as an important institution of
moral
education throughout history. It has guided civilizations in their
pur-
suits of peace as well as war. In some systems, goodness is seen
as the
natural state of humankind, with evil entering as an aberration.
In
the biblical account of the creation of humanity, Adam and Eve
are
initially innocent, existing in a sort of blissful ignorance. A
serpent
appears who convinces the pair to disobey God and consume
fruit
from the tree of knowledge, saying, "Eat thereof, then your eyes
shall
be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."3
Thus
Adam and Eve begin their encounters with sin. In some systems,
good and evil are transposed with notions of truth and falseness.
Socrates is remembered for his belief that certain great truths
exist
and humanity's task is to understand them. Plato, regarded by

many
as the most influential figure in Western philosophy, asserted
that
values such as absolute beauty and goodness exist in "ideal
forms"
that people can never truly lmow, but they can experience
through
copies manifest in things seen in the world. Unlike Socrates,
who
believed in many truths, Plato argued that there exists one basic
truth-"the good" -to which people should aspire. Because the
world we experience is but a realm of copies of "goodness,"
these
copies render understandings that are always imperfect and can
sometimes be evil.
Some psychologists argue that concepts of good and evil are
hard-
wired into our brains. George Lakoff writes that such values are
part
of the basic architecture of thinking manifest in early
childhood. In
Lakoff's view, much of the way we think is organized by "deep
frames" or fundamental concepts in the unconscious, which we
BELIEF 57
develop through repeated exposure to ideas. Deep frames
"structure
how you view the world," Lakoff explains.4 They characterize
the
moral and political principles that are so deep they are part of
our
very identities. "Deep framing is the conceptual infrastructure
of the
mind: the foundation, walls, and beams of that edifice."5 The

surface
thinking that goes with everyday experience, conversation, and
media are effective to the extent they fit only within deep
frames.
Owing to their centrality in human belief systems, concepts of
good and evil have functioned as central elements in
storytelling
throughout history. Ancient myths, prehistoric renderings, early
lit-
erature, and religious writings all depend on the simple
opposition of
good and evil in creating dramatic tension and conveying
meaning-
ful narratives. Most fairy tales and children's stories hinge on a
simple opposition of good and evil values. Characters encounter
evil
witches, giants, or monsters. Peter Pan fought Captain Hook,
Harry
Potter battled Voldemort, and Superman faced dozens of bad
guys. It
doesn't take much insight to recognize the transparent
moralizing in
myths and children's stories. Most of these narratives function
both
to entertain and to instruct. This is because the stories always
come
from adults who see them as a vehicle for instilling values in
children.
As Jack Zipes writes, "There never has been a literature
conceived by
children for children, a literature that belongs to children."6
Zipes
points that children, when left to their own devices, often do not
cre-
ate stories of menacing bad guys who are overcome by virtuous

fig-
ures. Instead they recreate other forms of play in their
narratives.
Keep in mind that children not only don't write most children's
sto-
ries, but they also don't frequently select and purchase the
books,
CDs, or videos. The choices come from the well-intentioned
adults
who make the decisions for children and hence create the
cultural
realm their children inhabit.
The moralizing in children's culture helps create a good versus
bad worldview that sets the stage for a binary understanding of
the
world. But it would be a mistake to attribute this black-and-
white
worldview to fairy tales alone. Underlying this binary
worldview are
deeper philosophical structures that undergird human
consciousness
itself Before the Western enlightenment that emerged at the end
of
the Middle Ages, the opposition of life and death was manifest
in the
dualism between God and humankind, between heaven and
earth,
expressed in human experience in the division of man and
woman.
Plato wrote of the opposition of the corporeal and the spiritual.

In
the 1500s Nicolas Copernicus and Francis Bacon drew
distinctions
between science (fact) and religion (belief ). Two centuries later
Rene
Descartes formulated his famous mind/body dualism, writing
that
"the mind is completely distinct from the body: to wit, that
matter,
whose essence is extension in space, is always divisible,
whereas the
mind is utterly indivisible."7 Later philosophers parsed the
various
kinds of realities and images that the mind could formulate, as
dis-
tinctions were drawn between perception and imagination,
reason
and emotion. Dualism could not have grown to such a large
concept
if it did have a use and importance. From early childhood
through
adulthood, the concept of opposing ideas, concepts, and values
forms the basis of people's ability to see difference, draw
distinctions,
and engage in critical thought. It underlies legality and
illegality,
knowledge and ignorance, progress and the lack thereof Many
see
dualism as the essence of humanity and human thought.
But dualism has in fact been the rascal of human consciousness.
Its apparent ubiquity and universal applicability have led people
and
civilizations to believe it is the only way of viewing the world.
To
many people, knowing the difference between good and bad is

the
very essence of traditionalism that passes ethical values from
genera�
tion to generation. Inabilities to make clear, black-and-white
distinc-
tions in decision making and assigning value often have been
seen as
failures in judgment, insight, conviction, even courage.
Knowing the
difference between right and wrong is viewed by many as an
essential
element of adult consciousness and civilized society. What this
tradi-
tionalist perspective fails to realize is that duality is in fact but
one
way of viewing the world. It is in many ways an abstraction or
even a
fiction conceived about existence. There are many degrees of
value
that lie between truth and untruth. There are many shades of
moral-
ity and immorality between good and evil, just as there are
many
kinds of people. Admitting the shades of light and dark that
exist
between black-and-white distinctions obviously requires a more
complex thought process, one that recognizes ambiguity and
partial
answers to questions. President Bill Clinton was criticized by
politi-
cal conservatives for his resistance to dogmatic beliefs, and his
presi-
dency even was termed a "gray era" for this reason.
BELIEF 59

But in the post-Bush years, shades of gray seem to be making a
comeback. Recent elections have shown both Democrats and
Repub-
licans stepping over each other in efforts to stake out centrist
posi-
tions, keeping voters nearly evenly divided in many races.
Media
critics have noted the decline of traditional "good" and "bad"
charac-
ters in TV and movies, and the rising popularity of "antiheroes."
Most frequently cited is the family man and mafia kingpin at the
center of the long-running cable series, The Sopranos. Viewers
never
could decide whether to love or hate Tony, who strangled
another
mobster while touring colleges with his daughter. Jack Bauer of
24,
Don Draper of Mad Men, Patty Hewes of Damages, and Dexter
Morgan of Dexter all manifest similar blends of heroism and
selfish-
ness, virtue and dishonesty. Joshua Alston wrote that the Bush
presi-
dency "primed audiences for antihero worship, that in the midst
of a
war started with faulty intelligence, suspected terrorists sent to
black
sites and a domestic eavesdropping program, it's no wonder we
would be interested in delving deeply into the true motives
underly-
ing the actions of powerful people. "8 Is this emerging pattern
in
media preferences evidence of changing public attitudes-
perhaps a
new moment in American consciousness--or simply another
pendu-
lum swing in popular taste?

Absolutism and Relativism
"Absolutism" is the belief that there are concrete standards
against
which moral questions can be judged, and that certain actions
are
right or wrong, regardless of the context in which they occur.
Abso-
lutism is often contrasted with moral "relativism," which asserts
that
moral truths are contingent upon social or historical
circumstances.
Absolutists believe that morals are inherent in the laws of the
uni-
verse, the nature of humanity, or the will of God. From this
perspec-
tive, all actions can be evaluated as either inherently moral or
immoral. For example, an unprovoked war might be deemed a
moral
act by an absolutist.
Relativists eschew absolute black-and-white answers to
questions.
Rather than applying a fixed set of good or bad definitions that
always apply in judgments, relativists often argue that new
answers to
questions must be created for every situation. What is true in
one
situation might not be true in another. For example, an
absolutist

view of the family might say that only conventional nuclear
families,
gender roles, and childrearing practices are universally valid,
and that
single-parent families, working mothers, or extended family
models
aren't good. A relativist approach would say that different kinds
of
families work in different situations. Some people criticize
relativist
views, especially when it comes to families, as too tolerant.
Oppo-
nents to relativism say that such thinking allows important
standards
to be abandoned and leads people into undisciplined lifestyles.
By
some accounts, the origination of relativism can be dated to
Protago-
ras (481-420 BC), who took issue with popular beliefs of the
time
that human beings should aspire to godlike ethical perfection.
Argu-
ing for a more flexible approach to morality, Protagoras wrote
that
"man is the measure of all things."9
Nearly eighty years ago, C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud
famously
debated moral absolutism versus relativism. Much of the
discussion
involved a disagreement over the existence of God and the
impor-
tance of science. Lewis, born an Irish Christian and the author
of the
seven-book Chronicles of Narnia (1949-1954) series, asserted
that

science could not adequat<;:ly explain the mysteries of the
creation
and workings of the universe. 10 Lewis wrote, "We want to
know
whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no
reason or
whether there is a power behind what makes it what it is." 11 To
Lewis, the only answer is that there must be a God who made
the
world and gave people the principles of moral law. Lewis
believed
that certain truths are hardwired into human consciousness, evi-
denced in the way codes of behavior-including abilities to
discern
right from wrong-replicate themselves from culture to culture
and
throughout human history. Freud, whose parents were Moravian
Jews, contended that God was a mental fabrication that
obscured the
fact that moral conventions emerge from human experience. To
Freud, morality is made up by people for practical reasons.
Human-
ity discovers moral laws the way it came upon mathematics,
through
observation and reasoning. People are born as blank slates.
Moral
precepts are passed from adults to children through educational
processes. Both Lewis and Freud argued about German Nazism.
Lewis argued that the Nazis had mistakenly adopted an alternate
reality in which they strayed from God, deceived into forgetting
a
BELIEF 61
morality they had originally recognized. For Freud, the Nazis
proved

that people could learn evil rather than goodness. Freud argued
that
the solution to Nazism was not religious virtue, but a superior
system
of reason.
Idealism, Realism, and Pluralism
Further insights into the debate over absolutism and relativism
are
found in the philosophies of idealism and realism. Idealists
resemble
absolutists in embracing tradition as a central value-a kind of
anchor. Idealism argues that we perceive the world from an
enduring
perspective that transcends all other points of view. Idealism
holds
that reality is mind-correlative or mind-coordinated. To
idealists,
tangible objects are not independent of the conscious mind but
exist
only through processes of intellectual operations. The everyday
world
of things and people is not the "real" world but a representation
as it
appears to be. Late eighteenth-century idealist Hegel argued
that an
internal spirit guides all perceptions, including human reason.
Hegel
described a "world-soul," existing through all history, which
emerges
from a process now known as the Hegelian dialectic. A
contempo-
rary of Hegel's, Immanuel Kant, wrote that the mind shapes our
per-
ceptions of the world to take form in both time and space. Kant

believed that all we can know are mental impressions of an
outside
world. Such mental impressions may or may not exist
independently
from the "real" because we can never access that outside world
directly.
Idealists view people as governed by universal truths to which
they should always aspire but can never achieve. These
transcenden-
tal values exist for all time and apply to all people, regardless
of their
historical circumstance or cultural heritage. In social terms,
idealists
tend to put their emphasis on behavior, attributing human
success
or failure to attitudes people bring to their exercise of free will.
Thus
values like paternal authority and marriage are held up as goals
to
which everyone should subscribe. Idealists see a fundamental
cor-
rectness in existing arrangements but fear its enabling values
are
eroding. This is the logic that argues that job discrimination,
sexual
harassment, and unfair housing practices really aren't that much
of a
problem, and the government programs to rectify them provide
inegalitarian preferences upon which "minority" groups become
dependent. Great importance is afforded to cultural issues, as

mani-
fest in controversies over literary canons, artistic censorship,
and the
labeling of records and video games. Culture is seen as the
embodi-
ment of these timeless values, not the reflection of everyday life
or
work. Idealist culture manifests itself in chosen lists of" great
books"
and masterpiece artworks housed in special preserves of
aesthetic
contemplation. Separated from the exigencies of daily life, art is
seen as devoid of political content or implication. Ironically,
rarely is
any consideration given to the corrupting influence of a market
that
emphasizes competition, greed, and wealth as measures of
human
worth.
Realism assumes that reality inheres in everyday experience and
that its functions can be accessed and known. Attending to
immedi-
ate circumstances in this way, realists often embrace relativism.
Because what we know derives from the here and now, realism
relies
on descriptions of objects and environments. Realism
recognizes the
importance of ordinary observations and events. It tends to
reject
idealistic views of the heroic and transcendental. In the early
1600s,
realist philosopher Descartes asserted that knowledge derives
from
the senses, and that we understand abstractions by relating them
to

our actual experiences of the world. Writing in the latter half of
the
seventeenth century, John Locke likewise asserted that a
perceivable
world exists "out there," which has certain qualities that
underlie our
broader understandings and knowledge.
Realists see truth emerging from the lived experiences of human
beings. As such, realists recognize that values develop
differently
from culture to culture and from era to era. Rules about gender
rela-
tionships or family structures are not permanently fixed but
need to
be evaluated in the context of changing social needs. Realists
are
often critical of a society they believe is emphasizing greed and
com-
petition rather than social justice. As a consequence, realists
promote
government programs to correct the inequities produced by
market
forces. Rather than attempting to manipulate people into
adopting
social norms, realists seek ways of broadening society to be
more
indusive--more tolerant of diversity and difference. Instead of
blam-
ing people in need for their circumstances, realists are more
likely to
favor a fundamental redistribution of wealth through such
measures
BELIEF 63

as assistance programs, government subsidies, and progressive
tax
legislation. Arguments that some people might lack motivation
or
require forms of moral education are rejected as biased. This
funda-
mentally redistributive program has made realists (who
generally
ascribe to liberal social politics) vulnerable to the charge that
they
simply want to throw resources at problems. As realist Molly
Ivins
jokingly stated, "This may sound simple, but the real problem
with
poor people is that they don't have enough money. "12 To
realists, cul-
ture is found in many places from the gallery to the classroom
to the
street. Because culture is found in the daily encounters people
have
with one another, it can be used to educate citizens and improve
their living conditions. Because it is tied to daily life, culture
always
bears political implications.
In their postures of mutual exclusion, both idealist and realist
camps hold part, but not all, of the means to understand social
prob-
lems. The inadequacy of such polarized thinking became
apparent in
the 1990s with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe
and
the evaporation of the Soviet threat. The George W. Bush years
sig-
naled a return to black-and-white reasoning. Yet as the 2008
elec-

tions demonstrated, Bush's failure to acknowledge a more
nuanced
vision didn't dick with the voting public. Approaches to politics
that
would separate issues into neat categories-like the separation of
economic structure from cultural behavior-no longer seemed
viable.
One way to reconcile idealism and realism is through the
doctrine
of pluralism. William E. Connolly writes at length about this
distinc-
tion, argµing that although realists reject the idea of a single
doctrine
that applies to all people, they eventually must make dear
choices in
specific situations. 13 Hence, a realist who opposes the general
princi-
ple of capital punishment might accept the death penalty for an
espe-
cially heinous crime such as terrorism. In contrast, pluralists
always
keep multiple options in play and would not necessarily practice
an
idealist "eye for an eye" approach to evil. Pluralism is difficult
to
practice because it requires the energy and restraint to maintain
mul-
tiple perspectives in one's mind. Moreover, pluralism cannot
eter-
nally vacillate between options. To do so would render it unable
to
take any action. Instead pluralism strives to maintain an
awareness of
options before, during, and afi:er an action takes place. As
Connolly

writes, pluralism "encourages us to embrace certain things in
this
particular place, to be indifferent to some, to be wary of others,
and
to fight militantly against the continuation of yet others."14
But not all versions of pluralism are created equal. The impetus
for pluralism has historical roots in the liberal discontent with
large
government bureaucracies. Historically, this difficulty was
exacer-
bated by the social diversification and class stratification
brought
on by industrialization. In the post-World War II era, theorists
in
Europe and the United States began to argue that forms of
plural-
ism that pitted individuals against the state oversimplified the
idea
of citizenship. Specifically, this thinking failed to consider
differ-
ences among people based on issues of gender, race, national
origin,
age, or sexual orientation. Perhaps more importantly, postwar
plu-
ralism failed to recognize the permeability of the categories
public
and private.
Poststructuralist theorists of the 1990s saw this dumping of
ideas

into either public or private domains as a return to one-
dimensional
modernist thinking. Not only did postwar U.S. pluralists
reinforce
conventional public/private categories, but they also were
incapable
of recognizing the subjects of politics as anything besides
members of
discrete groups; Postwar pluralism marked a significant advance
over
unreconstructed liberalism in carving out a larger role and a
more
complex arena for citizens to act politically, but it did so only
within
existing understandings of civic roles. Ernesto Ladau and
Chantal
Mouffe proposed what they termed a "radical democratic"
reconcep-
tualization of the citizen unencumbered by old categories of the
modernist self Rather than a unified and autonomous member of
a
particular group, within this formulation each person belongs to
numerous overlapping groups and multiple intersecting
identities. As
Mouffe explains, "It is not a matter of establishing a mere
alliance
between given interests, but of actually modifying their identity
to
bring about a new political identity."15 In this "poststructuralist
plu-
ralism" individuality is maintained because of the relatively
unique
mix of associations within each person.
Although it remains to be implemented in contemporary
politics,

the poststructuralist approach to pluralism has become manifest
in
the growing influence of advocacy groups in politics-enabled in
the
2000s by decentralized technologies such as the Internet. By
opening
BELIEF 65
new realms of public discourse, this networked pluralism gives
fresh
vitality to the impetus for democratic principles. The
politicization
of social spaces formerly considered neutral makes apparent the
often
unacknowledged power relations in everyday activities. In this
way,
such "off-limits" territories as popular culture, education, and
the
family become sites of critical investigation and emancipatory
con-
test. Rather than diminishing political involvement, radical
demo-
cracy helps people see political opportunities everywhere.
Obviously the task ahead is far from easy. The polarizing
effects of
conventional "liberal" versus "conservative" views of politics
make
life difficult for alternative thinking. This dualistic view is
encour-
aged by an electoral process that produces a rhetoric of
mandates and
landslides from narrow margins of the vote similar to those put
forth
in recent presidential elections. Our current winner-take-all

process
yields little understanding of the important relationship between
minority and majority stockholders in participatory government.
This encourages a strange denial of oppositional possibility.
Perhaps
the time has come to recognize that the majoritarian visions of
both
major political parties ends up devaluing human diversity. In
their
desperate efforts to claim majorities, differences with parties
are
viewed as obstacles to be suppressed in favor of a broader
consensus.
This is how vague appeals to populism can really represent an
elit-
ism of their own. To achieve their own visions of national
identity,
both liberals and conservatives have assaulted-in admittedly
differ-
ent ways-multiculturalism or identity politics as divisive.
Ignoring
historically entrenched power asymmetries, the big political
parties
have argued that "special interests" subvert the potential of a
national
accord. Promoted instead is a monolithic definition of
citizenship,
which dismisses the specificity of human variety as either
irrelevant
or selfish.
The antidemocratic implications of this pseudo populism
become
apparent in the way extreme political attitudes become
naturalized in

partisan discourses. Take education, for example. Republicans
and
Democrats seem incapable of reconciling their political appeal
to a
mainstream identity and an educational appeal to uniform "stan-
dards" of achievement. Implicit in recent school reform plans
from
both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush-with their programs of
uni-
versal testing, their vague suggestions of a uniform curriculum,
and
their invitation to business interests to manage public
education-
is the belief that the nation has spent too much time pursuing
edu-
cational equity and too little time in advancing rarefied
standards
of excellence. These attitudes have made many young people
feel
powerless, alienated, and even angry.
Enacted by the Bush administration in 2002, federal No Child
Left Behind (NCLB) legislation reauthorized several programs
aim-
ing to improve the performance of U.S. primary and secondary
schools by increasing standards of accountability and providing
par-
ents more flexibility in choosing schools. NCLB legislation pro-
moted standards-based education reform, formerly known as
"outcome-based" education, predicated on the belief that
measurable

goals improve student success in school. NCLB required new
tests in
basic skills as a requirement for federal funding. NCLB was
contro-
versial for a number of reasons. As historically has been the
case with
many national school reform efforts, NCLB was criticized
because
the federal government provides such a small proportion of
school
funding (which mostly comes from local property taxes). While
in
some states more students appeared to pass standardized tests,
this
was often proven to have resulted from lower testing standards.
Also,
parents were angered by NCLB's requirement that schools
provide
student names and contact information to military recruiters. In
2009, President Barack Obama received criticism for his
appoint-
ment of former Chicago Public School Director Arne Duncan as
Secretary of Education. Duncan built a reputation in Chicago
for his
aggressive pursuit of standardized testing, surveillance, and
police
presence in schools-manifest in the city's "Renaissance 2010"
school reform plan. Although popular in Chicago business
circles for
it's accountability and businesslike approach to management,
Ren-
aissance 2010 was condemned by some educators as old-
fashioned
and, ultimately, ineffective in improving student learning and
suc-
cess, especially in minority communities.16

All in the Family
Of course, controversies over schooling grow from the public
con-
cerns about children. Generally speaking, discussions about
children
emerge from the broader discourse on families-a conversation
BELIEF 67
fraught with cultural baggage. Officials running for office
recognize
that topics such as childhood, children's welfare, and the death
of
childhood work effectively in emotionalizing political
arguments.
The meanings of such terms can be quite variable, ranging from
ref-
erences to innocent children that need adult protection, to
menacing
children who take weapons to school, to the inner child, the
childlike
adult, and the adultlike child. In other words, childhood is not a
nat-
ural or fixed category. It is the screen upon which adults project
their
social anxieties and desires. The figure of the child has been
used his-
torically to promote issues ranging from environmentalism
("chil-
dren inherit the earth") to tax reform ("mortgaging our
children's
future"). This is why the image of the child often comes
attached to
idealized notions of the nuclear family, happy endings, and

neatly
resolved stories where handsome princes always win and bad
people
look like ugly monsters. At its core, the image of the child is an
ideo-
logical construction that gets pitted symbolically against all that
white bourgeois society fears. David Buckingham writes about
the
"politics of substitution" that childhood enables. In a climate of
social uncertainty, invoking fears about children provides a
powerful
means of commanding public attention and support: campaigns
against homosexuality are redefined as campaigns against
pedophiles;
campaigns against pornography become campaigns against child
predators; campaigns against atheism become campaigns against
rit-
ualistic child abuse. Those who dare to question the epidemic
pro-
portions of such phenomena are themselves labeled-via a
politics of
substitution-as hostile to children. 17
When all else fails in many public policy debates, proponents of
just about anything haul out the image of the helpless and
vulnerable
child. While it is true that children don't have the same
capabilities
as adults, it also can be said that these projections at times
discredit
the intelligence of young people and contribute to a distorted
infan-
tilization. Close examination of children's responses to violent
car-
toons, for example, reveals that they more often respond to the
excitement or excess of imagery than to the purposeful brutality

of
"retaliatory violence." When children write their own fairy
tales, they
tend to avoid this latter type of violence and write happy
endings for
all of the characters.18 Like adults, children do revel in the
arousal
and excitement of aggressive representation in what Michael
Zucker-
man termed the "sensation seeking" motive. 19 Parents often
worry
about children overidentifying with perpetuators of television or
movie violence. Surprisingly, there is very little data on this.
What
the research has shown is that most children don't imagine
them-
selves committing violence, although roughly half empathize
with
victims of violence.20 Even less plausible is the "forbidden
fruit" the-
ory that children's desires are increased if attempts are made to
restrict access to a program. A variety of studies in the 1970s
dis-
proved this widely accepted belief.21
In many ways, the current discourse on children stands in for
the
more politicized discussions of the family, gender roles, and
adult
sexuality. The National Organization for Women (NOW) for a
time

circulated a bumper sticker that read, "One Nuclear Family Can
Ruin Your Whole Life." The slogan sums up the view that
traditional
family structures-so often equated with a healthy society-have
sometimes worked to limit women's freedom. Throughout many
parts of the world, societies have or continue to be organized in
patriarchal structures in which men hold primary responsibility
and
authority over family and community life. While such traditions
seem long forgotten in the contemporary Western world, it bears
his-
torical note that a privilege as fundamental as the right to vote
wasn't
afforded to women until 1920 in the United States, 1944 in
France,
1949 in China, and 2006 in the United Arab Emirates.
One needs to examine only current women's magazines to dis-
cover that entrenched stereotypes of women as the "weaker" or
"fairer" sex" perpetuate themselves in the pages of
Cosmopolitan,
Glamour, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, and Wlgue-where
even more disturbingly women are frequently represented as
child-
like and girls are often made up to exude adult female sexuality.
Although women legally possess the same rights and theoretical
career options as men, roles of women as homemakers and
caregivers
abound in the pages of such publications as Family Circle, Good
Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Martha Stewart Living,
Redbook,
and %mens Day. That these are the magazines most read by
women
holds significance as a reminder of latent sexism in American
culture.
One notable exception is 0, The Oprah Magazine, the single

high-
circulation women's periodical with a pro feminist, diversity
empha-
sis. Television has treated women in more progressive terms,
led by
BELIEF 69
The %mens Television Network, Lifetime, and popular
programs like
Brothers and Sisters, Damages, Grey's Anatomy, Private
Practice, and
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles that feature women in
careers or other roles of autonomy. The one notable throwback
is Des-
perate Housewives, representing what has been termed a
"postfeminist"
sensibility in which purportedly liberated women voluntarily
choose
subordinate and objectified roles.
Simple statistics reflect continuing inequities toward women.
Fair
compensation for women in the workplace was written into law
in
the 1963 Equal Pay Restoration Act. Yet today women are still
paid
23 cents per dollar less than men with equal skills and
education.
While women make up 51 percent of the population, only 13
per-
cent of the U.S. Senate and 14 percent of the U.S. House of
Repre-
sentatives are women. Approximately 25 percent of doctors and
lawyers are women, although a much smaller percentage of
corporate

executive positions are held by women. 22 In global terms, The
United Nations has stated that "progress in bringing women into
leadership and decision-making positions around the world
remains
far too slow. "23 The Special Adviser to the Secretary-General
on Gen-
der Issues, Rachel Mayanja, said, "The past ten years have seen
the
fastest growth in the number of women in parliaments, yet even
at '
this rate, parity between women and men in parliaments will not
be
reached until 2040."24 The term "glass ceiling" is used to
describe
barriers based on discrimination. In the United States, the Glass
Ceiling Commission, a government-funded group, stated, "Over
half
of all master's degrees are now awarded to women, yet 95
percent of
senior-level managers of the top Fortune 1000 industrial and
500
service companies are men. Of them, 97 percent are white."25
With such glaring evidence of a cultural divide along gender
lines,
one might expect uniformity in public opinion about the need to
pursue equity. Yet opinion persists in some quarters that women
have
strayed too far from their traditional roles. Conservatives argue
that
America is threatened by a breakdown of the traditional tamily
struc-
ture that, in their view, provides the only satisfactory way of
raising
children. Conservatives assert that same-sex or single parent
families

produce children more prone to failure. Then there is the
Federal
"Defense of Marriage" Act, signed into law by President Bill
Clinton
in 1996. The act says that the federal government does not
recognize
same-sex marriages, but that states can do as they please. In
recent
elections, measures to either legitimize or delegitimize same-
sex mar-
riage have been put on many state ballots.
Unfounded worries persist about single-parent families. Conser-
vative commentator Ann Coulter writes, "The strongest
predictor of
whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a
sin-
gle parent."26 Coulter is fond of quoting Charles Murray, who
wrote
that "Illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of
our
time-more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, wel-
fare, or homelessness because it drives everything else."27
These are
serious words, considering that today nearly one-third of
children
are born to unmarried women. But is growing up in a nontradi-
tional family really harmful? Most social scientists do indeed
believe
that family environments strongly influence children's
subsequent

behavior in adult life. But what matters most in the family
environ-
ment is the quality of attachment and care-giving. Children
subject
to neglect or abuse may be more likely to find themselves in the
criminal justice system as young adults. 28 But even this is not
to say
that a "cycle of violence" necessarily results from family life, as
was
once theorized. Bad outcomes in adult behavior-including crimi-
nality-are a mix of upbringing, peer relationships,
socioeconomic
conditions, education, and circumstance. Any effort to blame a
sin-
gle cause must always be examined with scrutiny. Most people
spend more time with their families than in work or school.
Hence,
the family historically has remained one of the most potent
objects
of political debate--and one of the central issues that can be
used to
divide people--even though it is the most widely shared of
human
experiences.
Fundamentalism and Secularism
Much had been made in during the past decade of the divide
between fundamentalism and secularism. Christian
fundamentalist
camps largely avoided politics through the 1970s, believing that
mat-
ters of the spirit were personal concerns. For the most part,
funda-
mentalists also liked the separation of church and state that kept
government regulations out of church affairs. The

fundamentalist
label is sometimes applied to Christian evangelical practices,
which
BELIEF 71
are more accurately described as a branch of fundamentalism.
Fundamentalists-be they Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or any other
religion-try to adhere to the original tenants of a faith, generally
represented in classic texts such as the Bible, Torah, or Koran.
Funda-
mentalists often interpret scriptural writings in a literal sense,
rather
than viewing them in more modern interpretations as metaphors
or
idealistic stories. For example, some Christian fundamentalists
teach
that magical events, like instances of faith healing, really do
take
place in the present day. In the United States the term
"fundamental-
ist" came into use in the early twentieth century after
publication of
pamphlets called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth
(1910-
1915). In part, the fundamentalist movement gained momentum
in
response to the growing rise of science and societal changes
brought
about through technology. Turn of the century fundamentalists
were
especially troubled by the wide acceptance of Charles Darwin's,
Ori-
gin of the Species, which offered an evolutionary account of the
devel-
opment of human life.29 Christian fundamentalists still protest

the
teaching of Darwin's ideas in schools, often asserting that
children
need exposure to creationist counterarguments.
Fundamentalists often use the term secularism to describe those
perceived as antireligious. The term "secular" originated in
England
in the mid-1800s as a means of making a distinction between
philo-
sophical and religious ideas. Theorized by agnostic George
Holyoake,
secularism promoted a social order separate from religion,
without
actively dismissing or criticizing religious belie£ To Holyoake,
"Secu-
larism is not an argument against Christianity; it is one
independent
of it. It does not question the pretensions of Christianity; it
advances
others."30 As this phrasing suggests, from its earliest
appearance, sec-
ularism was seen by many as an assault on religion. More
generally,
the term refers to the world of ideas outside religion. For this
reason,
secularism often is used in political discussions that address the
sepa-
ration of church and state.
More than in most developed nations, religion figures promi-
nently in American life. In the industrial world, the United
States has
one of the lowest percentages of people who define themselves
as
having no religion: 15 percent.31 More than 75 percent of

Ameri-
can's identify as Christian, two-thirds of whom are Protestants,
with
the remaining group primarily identified as Catholic. 32
Half of the Protestant population is known as Evangelical,
which
well-known for the belief that people can be "born again."
Protestant
Evangelicals are somewhat more moderate in their beliefs than
fun-
damentalists, who subscribe to literal interpretations of Biblical
doc-
trine. Christian Fundamentalists appeared in the American
political
realm following the 1976 presidencial election of Democrat
Jimmy
Carter. Forming what they called a Moral Majority, Christian
funda-
mentalists helped sweep Ronald Reagan into office a few years
later.
Republicans held the White House for twelve years and
perceived the
election of Bill Clinton in 1992 as a tragic loss to the forces of
secu-
larism. To regain influence over the nation's politics, religious
conser-
vatives decided to focus on state and local politics, organizing a
mass
movement known as the Christian Coalition. Conservatives took
control of both houses of Congress in the mid-1990s. Building
on

the momentum of those efforts and the scandals of Clinton's
final
years in office, George W. Bush took the White House in 2000
and
held it for eight years, capitalizing in part on public fears that
resulted from the bombing of the World Trade Center and
subse-
quent terrorist attacks around the world.
The 9/11 attacks were perpetuated by a small group of Arabic
criminals who espoused beliefs in Islamic fundamentalism. To
many
in the United States, the actions of the al-Qaeda terrorists were
seen
as emblems of a global Islamic assault on the United States
rather
than the actions of an isolated group. But since no national
govern-
ment had supported the terrorists, it was difficult for the United
States to target a counterassault-or even a way to track down the
attackers. In an effort to give form to this enemy, George Bush
for-
mulated his Axis of Evil and began to search for a reason to
attack
one of its member nations. This required a substantial public
rela-
tions campaign, which the Bush administration mounted with
the
advice of marketing consultants. On the grounds that a new
attack
against the United States would soon be launched from Iraq,
Amer-
ica invaded that country, to find only that Iraq didn't have the
weapons of mass destruction it was thought to possess. The
political
fullout from this mistake gave Democrats the arguments they

needed
to retake Congress and later the presidency.
Regrettably, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and several other inci-
dents have given rise to perceptions of a growing "war" between
BELIEF 73
Islam and the Western world. Though it is widely acknowledged
that
9/ I 1 was executed by a very small minority oflslamic
extremists, sus-
picions of wider Islamic aggression persist. In recent years,
books
have been appearing that support such fears, including Steven
Emer-
son's American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us and
Brigitte
Gabriel's They Must Be Stopped: Why � Must Defeat Radical
Mam. 33
Building on the emotionalism following 9/11, such works
obscure
the reality that terrorist attacks in United States have been
perpetu-
ated by non-Islamics in places like Oklahoma City and
Columbine
High School.
Many Americans don't know that Islam is the second largest
faith
in the world after Christianity. Now a religion of 1.8 billion
people,
Islam is practiced by people known as Muslims, a word that
means
"One who submits to God." Muslims believe that God-also

called
Allah-was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, the same God
that
Christians and Jews believe spoke to Abraham. Most of the
world's
Muslims live in the Middle East, Northern Africa, and Southeast
Asia. There are several branches oflslam, the two largest of
which are
Sun.ni and Shi'a, who differ in their interpretation of
Muhammad's
teachings. Contrary to some perceptions in the United States
and
elsewhere, Islam does not promote aggression or intolerance. In
fact,
the Muslim scripture known as the Koran (or Quran) states that
"Those who believe (in the Quran), and those who follow the
Jewish
(scriptures), and the Christians ... and (all) who believe in God
and
the last day and work righteousness, shall have their reward
with
their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve."34
The growing awareness of the Islamic world among people in
the
United States also has brought attention to the American Jewish
population. At between 5 and 6 million people, America's
Jewish
population is roughly equivalent to that of Israel. Together the
two
nations are home to 80 percent of world's Jews. Sephardic Jews
from
Spain and Portugal began immigrating to the United States in
the
early 1800s, with a dramatic increase in the latter part of the
cen-

tury of Ashkenazi Jews from Germany and the Eastern European
nations of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania. Initially settling
primarily
in the eastern United States, Jewish communities quickly
developed
their own support networks, which were reinvigorated following
the
Nazi Holocaust of World War II. The influence ofJews in
American
business and academia has far exceeded their 2.5 percent share
of the
U.S. population, as has their influence on politics. Jewish
Americans
account for 37 percent of U.S. recipients of the Nobel Peace
Prize, 8
percent of the board seats of U.S. corporations, and 13 percent
of the
U.S. Senate. The role of Jews in U.S. leadership positions
partially
explains America's longstanding commitment to Israel, along
with
Israel's position as a bulwark of U.S. interests in the Middle
East. As
the United States has improved its diplomatic relationships with
the
region's oil-producing nations, most notably Saudi Arabia,
Arab-
Israeli tensions within the U.S. population have become another
aspect of America's divided culture.
Authoritarianism and Consumerism

As America grapples with its real and imagined enemies, the
nation
also struggles with the erosion of the very principles it seeks to
pro-
tect. Part of what is dividing U.S. culture is a weakening of
demo-
cracy. As America strives to regain its role as an example for
the world
to follow, its own people are succumbing to apathy and indiffer-
ence-even as they search for renewed purpose and "change."
The
most damaging impediments to American democracy can be
sum-
marized in two categories: authoritarianism and consumerism.
Authoritarianism is the process often associated with
modernism,
structuralism, and functionalism, which imposes bureaucratic
regula-
tion, surveillance, and control upon human activity. In this
scheme,
people submit to larger structures in the presumed interest of
the
social good. During the Bush years, authoritarianism got an
historic
boost with 9/11, which was used to spread fear and compliance
throughout the nation. Suppressed in the process was any sense
of
autonomy or permission to challenge the prevailing order.
Beyond
being told that they cannot question the interest of national
security,
citizens are implicitly told that they should not rock the boat,
cause
trouble, or upset the system. This thinking suggests that

disagree-
ment is a function of individual anomaly, maladjustment, inade-
quacy, or lack of will. Authoritarianism can be described as the
process through which people come to be seen as passive and
easily
manipulated objects, rather than active and autonomous
subjects.
Authoritarianism perpetuates a fatalism that tells people they
can do
BELi EF 75
little to alter the course of history or their own lives. This
passive ide-
ology infuses mass media. Movies, television, magazines, and
news-
papers suggest that the production of ideas and images is
something
that is always done by someone else. This message also is
reinforced
in the socializing processes of education that teaches children-
later
to become citizens-about hierarchies of knowledge, expertise,
and
superv1s1on.
Consumerism tells people that acquisition and consumption are
the road to personal satisfaction, while it simultaneously
promotes
hierarchies of wealth and power. Clearly, consumerism
frustrates
community by encouraging competitive acquisition. Debilitating
fic-
tions of "making it" and "the good life" are defined in terms of
soli-
tary consumption rather than civic concern. In the late 1990s,

former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher put it this
way:
'There is no such thing as society, only individual men and
women
and their families."35 The first strategy for getting out of the
con-
sumerist trap lies in pointing out the things that people actually
value most-friends, family, and home-cannot be bought with
money. Next, on a broader social level, one can raise the
question of
how well off the average citizen is and examine the
circumstances of
those who have suffered the consequences of economic failure.
Given
the glaring lack of equality in the United States, one can't help
asking
why more people aren't clamoring for radical change. Maybe it
has
to do with the perception that the task is so overwhelming. Or
per-
haps it results from the lack of a meaningful program from
either
political party. At the very least, critical intellectuals can
encourage
the growing rage of all citizens silenced by the ideals of
consumerist
paradise. With each passing year, the distance between the
dream
and the reality widens. The reckoning that is coming holds both
pos-
sibilities and potential difficulties for real social change.
Is any real progress on the horizon? The grip of
authoritarianism
and consumerism on the American people seems to be
weakening.

As the government in Washington has been handed back and
forth
in recent decades between the Republicans and the Democrats,
there appears to be a growing desire for meaningful social
transfor-
mation. For this reason, it is more important than ever for
people
committed to change to seize the initiative rather than wait for
oth-
ers to act. This is the challenge of the Obama era. Well before
the
Obama administration, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe pre-
sciently argued, "If the demands of a subordinated group are
pre-
sented purely as negative demands subversive of a certain order,
without being linked to any viable project for the reconstruction
of
specific areas of society, their capacity to act hegemonically
will be
excluded from the outset."36 Framed in this manner, the
solipsistic
nihilism that had so dominated progressive politics in the early
2000s was both defensive and counterproductive. We need a
posi-
tive plan.
This new initiative must combine a politics and an ethics of a
sort
not typically drawn upon by activists. These entail types of
practice
that both eschew easy answers and ambivalent relativism. The

seem-
ingly paradoxical recipe needed will respect differences, oppose
oppressions, and permit the contingencies of provisional spaces
of
experiment with new social forms. Given such a challenge, it is
incumbent upon future change agents to reassert their roles in
civic
life. This calls for activists to assume new social roles and to
pursue
new forums for civic dialogue. 37 As politics in the 2000s has
shown,
new public spaces like the Internet have remarkable potential
for
invigorating political life, especially among the young and
previously
disenfranchised. This kind of change entails promoting notions
of
shared responsibility for community life along with the belief
that
change is indeed possible. This is a profoundly cultural
endeavor in
that it is an act of political education. Such a cultural program
con-
vinces people that individual acts of citizenship (such as voting)
can
make a difference-that people themselves can command the
authority to make community decisions.
At the heart of the struggle must stand a set of competencies
through which cultural activists can dismantle structures that
exclude
people from political life and that tell people their voices are
unim-
portant. At the same time, it is necessary to connect a pair of
con-
cepts that authoritarian consciousness always has found itself

unable
to reconcile: difference and egalitarianism. In the bankrupt
authori-
tarian view, differing needs or interests are to be overcome or
sup-
pressed in the interests of equality. Implicit in this view is a
hierarchy
of opinion supporting an idealized "national" identity. While
this
idealized appeal to the common good can encourage citizens to
look
beyond their narrow self-interests, it also asks them to give up
some-
BELIEF 77
thing of themselves. A genuine democracy does not make these
kinds
of demands but strikes a balance between differing interests and
egal-
itarian society
Consumerism and authoritarianism work against this delicate
bal-
ancing. For this reason, critically minded citizens need to keep
democratic values at the forefront of American public debate-
not
the authoritarian democracy of unproblematic civic
verisimilitude
and flag-waving patriotism, not the consumerist democracy in
which
people are free to spend themselves into a happy life-a
democracy
defined by continual struggle, change, and critical revision.
This is
not to suggest a return to nostalgic origins but to propose a

demo-
cratic imaginary perhaps yet unachieved in American history.
The
task has political and ethical dimensions. In political terms, the
com-
mon shortcoming of all prevailing governments (including
utopian
ones) is their applications of a single set of standards for
everyone.
This problem becomes particularly evident within conventional
lib-
eralism. Although frequently presented as a pathway to
emancipa-
tion, mainstream liberalism nevertheless perpetuates
distinctions
between historical subjects and objects: those who act and those
who
are acted upon. It seeks to make surface corrections to a
structurally
flawed system without interrogating its underlying inequities.
Regrettably, this is the pitfull of much high-minded
intellectualism
and academic theory, which commits the additional sin of
claiming
vanguard wisdom only for its own members. Such
condescending
logic has also been attributed to the prescriptive exhortations of
"empowerment" associated with social concern.
In contrast, a genuine democracy-what Laclau and Mouffe term
a "radical democracy"--defines itself on all levels in pluralistic
terms.
There is no single set of attitudes or social group to which all
others
must conform because an acknowledgment is made of the
impossi-

bility of any one perspective that satisfies diverse needs.
Instead, the
unifying ethos is one of decentered authority. Owing to this
latter
principle, such a political program resists the vacuous
amoralities of
relativism and unexamined pluralism. For obvious reasons, such
a
scheme seems dangerously unstable to many conservatives who
warn
of the "threat" of uncontained difference. This is where the
ethical
dimension of radical democracy comes in. What is necessary is
a way
to integrate public and private realms without succumbing to a
156 NOTES
the Crossroads in the Information Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Lit-
tlefield, 2001); David Trend, Reading Digital Culture (Malden,
MA:
Blackwell, 2001); David Trend, The Myth of Media Violence
(Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2007); David Trend, Everyday Culture: Finding
and
Making Meaning in a Changing World (Boulder, CO: Paradigm,
2007).
19. Georg W ilhelm Frederich Hegel, Phenomenology of the
Spirit,
trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977).
Chapter 3

1. George W. Bush, "Victory Speech," delivered at Yale
Universiry,
December 20, 2000, http://everything2.com (accessed February
24,
2009).
2. Ronald Reagan, "Evil Empire Speech," March 8, 1983,
http://www
.teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=961
(accessed
May 15, 2008).
3. Holy Bible, King James Version, "Book of Genesis," vol. 5,
ch. 3
(Philadelphia, PA: National, 1978).
4. George Lakoff, Whose Freedom? The Battle over Americas
Most
Important Idea (New York: Picador, 2006), 12.
5. Ibid.
6. Jack Zipes, Sticks and Stones: The Troublesome Success of
Children s
Literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter (New York:
Routledge,
2001), 42.
7. Rene Descartes, as quoted in David E. Cooper, World
Philosophies:
An Historicallntroduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 253.
8. Joshua Alston, "Too Much of a Bad Thing," Newsweek
(January
12, 2009), http://www.newsweek.com (accessed February 2,

2009).
9. Protagoras, "Moral Relativism," http://www.wikipedia.org
(accessed May 10, 2008).
10. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles ofNarnia (New York:
HarperCollins,
2006).
11. C. S. Lewis, quoted in Armond M. Nicholi and Theodore
Dal-
rymple, "C. S. Lewis vs. Sigmund Freud on Good and Evil,"
American
Enterprise, http://www.taemag.com (accessed May 11, 2008).
12. Molly Ivins, untitled address, National Public Radio, June
22,
1995.
13. William E. Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke
Universiry
Press, 2005).
NOTES 157
14. Ibid., 42.
15. Chantal Mouffe, "Democratic Politics Today," in
Dimensions of
Radical Democracy, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Verso, 1991).
16. Henry A. Giroux and Kenneth Saltzman, "Obama's Betrayal
of
Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of
School-
ing," http://www.truthout.org (accessed January 30, 2009).

17. David Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood: Growing
Up in
the Age of Electronic Media (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000),
11.
18. Ibid., 72.
19. Michael Zuckerman, Sensation Seeking: Beyond the Optimal
Level
of Arousal (New York: Wiley, 1979).
20. Ibid., 99.
21. "Women's Gains in Politics Not Seen in Board Rooms, CEO
Offices," November 17, 2008, http://www.news.ucdavis.edu
(accessed
February 8, 2009).
22. UN Division for the Advancement of Women, "Women Still
Struggle to Break through Glass Ceiling in Government,
Business, and
Academia," March 8, 2006, http://.www.un.org (accessed
February 2,
2009).
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ann Coulter, Guilty: Liberal Victims and Their Assault on
America
(New York: Crown Forum, 2008), 37.
26. Charles Murray, cited in Coulter, Guilty, 37.
27. S. E. Holmes Jr. and J. Kashani Slaughter, "Risk Factors in
Child-
hood That Lead to the Development of Conduct Disorder and

Antiso-
cial Personaliry Disorder," Child Psychiatry and Human
Development 31
(2001): 183-193.
28. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of
Natural
Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle
far Life
(New York: BiblioBazaar, 2007 [1859]).
29. "Secularism," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularism
(accessed
May 15, 2008).
30. "American Religious Identification Survey," Ciry Universiry
of
New York, 2001, http://www.gc.cuny.edu (accessed February
10, 2009).
31. Ibid. Other religious denominations in the United States are
Mormon (1.6 percent), Muslim (0.6 percent), Buddhist (0.5
percent),
and Hindu (0.4 percent).
158 NOTES
32. Steven Emerson, American jihad: The Terrorists Living
among Us
(New York: Free Press, 2002); Brigitte Gabriel, They Must Be
Stopped·
Why m Must Defeat Radical Islam (New York: St Martin's,
2008).

33. "The Cow," in Qur'an, 2:62.
34. Margaret Thatcher, "AIDS Education and the Year 2000,"
speech
delivered October 31, 1987, http://www.margarettharcher.org
(accessed
February 27, 2009).
35. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and
Socialist
Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston
Moore
and Paul Cammack (London: Verso, 1985), 189.
36. See Jilrgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative
Action, vol.
1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas
McCarthy
(Boston: Beacon, 1984).
37. See John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York:
Macmil-
lan, 1910), 321-360.
Chapter4
1. U.S. Census Bureau, The American and Alaska Native
Population:
2000 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2001).
2. Emme Lazarus, "The New Colossus," http://www.libertys-
tatepark.com/emma.htm (accessed February 24, 2009).
3. Roy Beck and Steven A. Camarots, "Elite vs. Public Opinion:
An
Examination of Divergent Views on Immigration," Center for

Immigra-
tion Studies, 2002, http://www.cis.org/articles/2002/backl
402.html
(accessed June 19, 2008).
4. "Public Opinion Polls on Immigration," Time (January 2006),
http://www.fairus.org (accessed June 19, 2008).
5. Deborah White, "Pros and Cons of the Immigration Reform
Act
of 2007," http:1/about.com (accessed June 18, 2008).
6. Sam Roberts, "Government Offers Look at Nation's
Immigrants,"
New York Times, February 21, 2009.
7. Congressional Budget Office, Immigration in the United
States
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Offcie, 2006).
8. "Myths and Facts about Youth Crime," Center on Juvenile
Crimi-
nal Justice, 2000, http:l/www.cjcj.org/jjic/myths_facts.php
(accessed
June 25, 2008).
9. Slavoj Zizek, mlcome to the Desert of the Real (London:
Verso,
2002), 19.
NOTES 159
10. H. Aaron Cohl, Are™- Scaring Ourselves to Death? (New
York: St
Martins, 1997), 9.

11. Claudine Chamberlain, "Fear of Fear Itself," June 22, 2003,
http://abcnews.com (accessed January 3, 2009), 2.
12. Ibid., 1.
13. Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are
Afraid of
the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
14. Chamberlain, "Fear of Fear Itself," 2.
15. Ibid.
16. Mike Males, Framing Youth: IO Myths about the Next
Generation
(Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1998), 29.
17. David L. Altheide, Creating Fear: News and the
Construction of
Crisis (New York: de Gruyter, 2002), 19.
18. Ibid.
19. Frederick John Desroches, Force and Fear: Robbery in
Canada
(Toronto: Canadian Scholars, 2002).
20. Glassner, The Culture of Fear.
21. Mike Davis, The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the
Imagination
of Disaster (New York: Metropolis, 1998).
22. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (London: Wilder,
2008).
23. David Gardiner, The Science of Fear (New York: Dutton,
2008).
24. Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano, Stop Teaching Our

Kids
to Kill: A Call to Action against Tv, Movie, and Video Game
Violence
(New York: Crown, 1999), 1.
25. Glassner, The Culture of Fear, xxi.
26. Ibid.
27. Lewis Beale, "Picturing the Worst Happening," New York
Times,
July 7, 2002, sec. 2, 1, 9.
28. C. S. Green and D. Bavelier, "Action Video Game Modifies
Visual Selective Attention," Nature 423 (2003): 534-537.
29. Eric Chudler, "Video Games May Improve Visual Skills,"
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/videog.html. (accessed
June 19,
2003).
30. Julian Dibbell, "A Rape in Cyberspace; or How an Evil
Clown, a
Haitian Trixter Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens
Turned a
Database into a Society," Village Voice (December 21, 1993):
36.
AWarforthe
Soul of America
A History of the Culture Wars

ANDREW HARTMAN
The University of Chicago Press CHICAGO AND LONDON
3
Taking God's
Country Back
In an influential 1976 essay, "What Is a Neoconservative? ,"
Irving Kris-
tal wrote that he and his fellow neoconservatives tended "to be
re-
spectful of traditional values and institutions," religion being
perhaps
the most important such traditional institution. Yet Kristal was
not
very religious himself. As it was for other New York
intellectuals, even
most neoconservatives, Judaism was more about his cultural
identity
than about his religious affiliation. Nevertheless, he valued
religion as
foundational to representative democracy, believing it helped
curb
the unmoored urges of people left to their own devices. "The
indi-
vidual who is abruptly 'liberated' from the sovereignty of
traditional
values will soon find himself experiencing the vertigo and
despair of
nihilism." These feelings, Kristal warned, were what tempted
people
to submit to authoritarian rule.1

In this elocution, neoconservatives helped articulate yet another
conservative paradigm for understanding the dangers presented
by
cultural radicalism, endowing conservative America with a
powerful
rhetorical weapon to fight the culture wars. And yet it is
doubtful that
neoconservatives entirely grasped the full extent of "the vertigo
and
despair" that millions of Christian Americans felt living in post-
sixties
America. This was particularly true of white evangelicals,
whose inter-
pretations of the sixties cultural revolutions grafted onto older
under-
standings about the grave dangers posed by modernity.
Thanks to several Great Awakenings since the colonial era, the
United States has long been home to the world's largest
population of
evangelical Christians, Protestants who pay less attention to
liturgy
than to personal conversion and piety and who believe entry to
God's
Taking God's Country Back 71
kingdom requires that they spread his word on earth. That
evangeli-
cals have tended to mix their religious and national identities
has long
tinged the rhetoric of American cultural politics with an
eschatologi-
cal hue. This became increasingly so in the twentieth century as

more
and more religious Americans felt scarred by the acids of
modernity,
which burned gaping, irreparable holes in the fabric of Christian
America. For them the culture wars, more than a battle over
national
identity, have served as a struggle for the soul of America, a
clash over
what it means to live in a world in which all foundations had
been
pulled out from under, a world in which, at its starkest, "God is
dead."2
Even devout evangelicals-devout evangelicals especially-had to
act upon the implications of modernity. In pushing back against
mod-
ernist forms of knowledge that fanned the flames of religious
skep-
ticism, such as biblical criticism and Darwinism, early-
twentieth-
century conservative evangelicals-many of whom, by the 1920s,
accentuated biblical inerrancy and began referring to themselves
as
"fundamentalists" -successfully enacted laws that mandated
reading
the King James Bible in schools and outlawed the teaching of
evolu-
tion. Such activism sprang from a desire to reassert religious
control
over a society that was becoming increasingly modern and
secular.3
By the 1970s, conservative white evangelicals were confronted
with
a perfect storm of secular power that they deemed a threat to
their

way of life and to the Christian nation they believed the United
States
once was and ought to be again. This realization, more than
anything
else, led religious conservatives to take up arms in the culture
wars.
Worldly activism became more imperative, so much so that
conser-
vative evangelicals formed an uneasy political alliance with
conserva-
tive Americans from different theological backgrounds. Even
funda-
mentalists, whose insistence upon correct doctrine meant that
minor
differences in biblical interpretation often led to major schisms,
reluc-
tantly joined forces with conservative Catholics, Jews, and
Mormons.
This was all the more remarkable given that many
fundamentalists
viewed the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy, a Catholic, as a
sign that
the end times were fast approaching.4
The overarching issue for religious conservatives, and what
brought
them together with their former adversaries, was the threat
posed by
an increasingly secular state. School prayer, long practiced in
most
American public schools, had been rendered unconstitutional by
the
landmark 1962 Engel v. Vitale Supreme Court decision. In
1978, in

72 CHAPTER THREE
another example of how the secular state encroached upon
Christian
America, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) implemented a
federal
mandate requiring that Christian private schools comply with
deseg-
regation practices or risk having their tax-exempt status
revoked. The
Christian Right-as it came to be known by 1980, the year it
helped
elect Ronald Reagan president, signaling its arrival as a
powerful po-
litical alliance-worked from the assumption that an increasingly
sec-
ular government represented the gravest threat to Christian
values.
Part of this had to do with the conservative religious impression
that
the government conspired against the traditional family unit. In
an
earlier era, when W illiam Jennings Bryan's biblically inspired
popu-

lism appealed to millions of Americans, evangelicals had often
mar-
ried their anxieties about the family to progressive economic
concerns
about the destructive force of unregulated monopoly capitalism.
But
by the 1970s, the traditionalist worldview of conservative
Christians
and the antistatist premises that inspired more and more
Americans
were no longer mutually exclusive ideological trajectories. As
an in-
structive example, conservatives posited that government's
meddling
in the form of welfare policies weakened the traditional family
struc-
ture. "Families are strong when they have a function to
perform," con-
servative activist Connie Marshner contended. "And the more
gov-
ernment, combined with the helping professions establishment,
take
away the functions families need to perform-to provide their
health
care, their child care, their housing-the less purpose there is for

a
family, per se, to exist."5
By the same logic, the Christian Right focused on the role of
public
education. State-run schools were thought to be the primary
secular
institution geared to disrupt the inculcation of religious values
that
had traditionally transpired in the family.
As long as there has been American public education, there has
been resistance to elements of it, hailing from a variety of
different
forces all along the political and religious spectrums. Such
resistance
took on mostly conservative overtones in the twentieth century,
when
the national curriculum slowly but surely merged with the
progres-
sive curriculum innovated by John Dewey and a cohort of prom-
inent pedagogues at Columbia University's Teacher 's College.
Pro-
gressive education was a secular movement that sought to
distance

the national curriculum from the ecumenical Protestantism that
had
Taking God's Country Back
73
been its organizing force since Horace Mann's common school
move-
ment in the early nineteenth century. Not surprisingly,
progressives
clashed with fundamentalists over an assortment of curricular
items,
particularly over mandatory Bible reading and over whether to
teach
Darwin's evolutionary science or creationism . 1his collision
famously
sparked the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee,
which
put fundamentalists on the map, often as a source of derision for
more
cosmopolitan-minded Americans. H. L. Mencken's acerbic
commen-
tary on the trial painted a harsh picture of fundamentalists as
rubes
who promoted the story of Genesis because it was "so simple
that

even a yokel can grasp it."6
By the end of the 1930s, to the dismay of conservatives, the
pro-
gressive curriculum had become even more prevalent in many
schools
across the country. Teacher 's College professor Harold Rugg's
popu-
lar textbooks Man and His Changing Society, which
incorporated the
scholarship of progressive historian Charles Beard, who
subjected
the American past to the paradigm of class conflict, were
assigned to
more than five million students in five thousand school
districts. But
conservative resistance to progressivism grew as well, made
evident
by the successful movement in the early 1940s to remove Rugg's
text-
books from schools. By the early Cold War, conservative
educational
vigilantism, abetted by McCarthyism, had turned back the tides
of
the progressive curriculum across the nation. In the 1950s, as

thou-
sands of progressive educators learned the hard way, mere
mention
of Dewey was likened to summoning the ghost of Karl Marx.
But de-
spite its reach, Cold War conservatism kept a lid on liberalizing
cur-
ricular trends for only a short time. The cultural earthquakes of
the
sixties shattered the short-lived antiprogressive consensus
formed in
the early Cold War. By the 1970s, the Christian Right had valid
reason
to believe that the nation's public schools no longer represented
their
moral vision.7
The Supreme Court enshrined secularism in the schools with a
se-
ries of landmark cases, most famously the 1962 Engel v. Vitale
ruling
that New York's twenty-two-word school prayer violated the
First
�endment's Establishment Clause. In 1963 the court built an
even

.higher wall of separation between church and state with its
School
District of Abington Township v. Schempp decision in favor of
Ellary
ldiempp, a Unitarian freethinker who challenged the
constitutional-
L
74
CHAPTER THREE
ity of mandatory Bible reading in his high school. In polls taken
since
the sixties, the school prayer and Bible-reading rulings have
routinely
ranked as the most unpopular Supreme Court decisions,
particularly
among conservative Christians, many of whom considered Engel
and
Abington the beginning of American civilization's downfall.
Some
members of Congress received more letters about school prayer
and
Bible reading than any other issues. Millions of Americans

showed
their displeasure with the new law of the land by disobeying it,
as
students in schools across the country, particularly in the South
and
Midwest, persisted in their age-old practice of praying and
reading
the Bible together. Those who disagreed with Engel and
Abington con-
tended that it was undemocratic for the "philosopher-kings" on
the
Supreme Court to overrule the majority of Americans who
wanted
children to pray in school. Wtlliam Buckley Jr. gave voice to a
grow-
ing conservative displeasure with the Supreme Court, which,
due to
its "ideological fanaticism," he argued, "is making it
increasingly dif-
ficult for our society to breathe normally: to govern itself
through es-
tablished tradition and authority; to rule by the local consensus;
to
deal effectively with its domestic enemies; to carry forward its
im-

plicit commitment to the faith of its fathers."8
Post-sixties curriculum trends also distressed conservative
Chris-
tians. In social studies classes, students were increasingly
challenged to
clarify their own values, independent of those instilled by
parents and
churches. In science, teachers slowly overcame the perpetual
taboo
against teaching evolution. And in health classes, honest
discussion
of sex came to replace moral exhortation. A popular
anthropology
curriculum created for elementary students by psychologist
Jerome
Bruner in the early 197os-MACOS, or Man: A Course of Study-
exemplified the secularization of the curriculum. During a MA
COS
unit students examined the Netsilik Eskimo culture, including
their
practice of killing the elderly, in order to understand and not
judge
cultural differences. Such relativistic lesson plans became the
norm.

In 1969 the National Education Association (NEA) advocated
what
it called the "inquiry method" of instruction, a Socratic
discussion
technique that would allow students "to view knowledge as
tentative
rather than absolute" and thus "to see that value judgments
cannot be
accepted solely on faith." Opposing MACOS-style learning
became a
rallying cry for Christian culture warriors. "Your tax dollars are
being
used," Jesse Helms cautioned recipients of a 1976 fundraising
letter,
"to pay for grade school courses that teach our children that
canni-
balism, wife swapping, and the murder of infants and the
elderly are
acceptable behavior."9
Religious conservatives organized against these curriculum
reform
efforts from the outset, particularly against sex education,

which was
becoming an increasingly common feature of the national
curriculum.
In 1963 Dr. Mary Calderone founded the Sex Information and
Educa-
tion Council of the United States (SIECUS) on the premise that
ob-
jective sex education was a more realistic means to suppress the
sex-
ual revolution than chastisement. Many educators agreed with
her,
including Sally Williams, a school nurse in Anaheim,
California, who
created a popular sex education curriculum. Williams sought to
direct
students away from premarital sex, but her curriculum described
sex-
ual intercourse in relatively graphic fashion for students as
young as
twelve and provided information to older students about birth
con-
trol, in recognition that premarital sex was likely. Religious
conserva-
tives, predictably moralist, opposed such an approach and in
1969, af-

ter gaining a majority on the Anaheim school board, promptly
ended
the sex education program.10
Conservatives elsewhere replicated the efforts of Anaheim
activ-
ists. Fundamentalist preacher Billy James Hatgis's Christian
Crusade
helped launch a national movement against sex education.
Hargis's
lieutenant Gordon Drake authored a pamphlet-"Is the
Schoolhouse
the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex?" -that purportedly sold
ninety
thousand copies in three months. Hargis and Drake forever
engraved
SIECUS, "the pornographic arm of liberal education," as a
subversive
group in the conservative lexicon, "all a part of a giant
communist
conspiracy." In his stock speech, Hargis claimed that sex
education
was part of a larger plan hatched by progressive educators to
"destroy
the traditional moral fiber of America and replace it with a

pervasive
sickly humanism." In a letter to Christian Crusaders, Hargis
com-
plained about a sex education program in Jefferson County,
Colorado,
where the principal "said that the concept of morality being
taught in
his school to elementary grade children was quite different from
that
of their parents and pastors, and the kids would have to decide
which
was right."11
In Kanawha County, West Virginia, violent protests erupted
when
76 CHAPTER THREE
the school board sought to align with a 1970 state regulation
mandat-
ing that all West Virginia students read texts reflecting the
nation's
multiethnic composition. Toe Kanawha textbook fight,
described in
hyperbolic fashion as "the shot heard around the world,"
influenced
the Christian Right's approach to later curriculum battles. Alice
Moore, the wife of a local evangelical minister who was elected
to the

Kanawha board in 1970 on a conservative platform that
included an
anti-sex education plank, was the first to object to the proposed
read-
ing list. Due to her tireless campaigning during the summer of
1974,
when the Kanawha schools opened that September at least 20
percent
of the student population stayed home. In sympathy, county coal
min-
ers organized a wildcat strike. Violence marred the campaign:
buses
were shot at, teachers were harassed, and a school district
building
was firebombed. National right-wing groups descended upon
West
Virginia to join the cause, including the John Birch Society and
the Ku
Klux Klan, the latter of which held a notorious rally at the state
capitol.
Behind the scenes, the newly formed Heritage Foundation, still
a rel-
atively unknown right-wing think tank, offered free legal
support to
protestors and organized a conference on the rights of parents.
Con-
nie Marshner, the Heritage Foundation's first director of
education,
later maintained that the West Virginia story called attention to
"the
textbook problem across the country " and helped inform the
Chris-
tian Right during its later culture war struggles.12
Not surprisingly, racial anxieties factored into the Kanawha
text-

book battle. Local conservatives seemed horrified that Eldridge
Cleav-
er's Soul on Ice, depicted as "anti-white racism, " appeared on
the read-
ing list. However, such racial concerns often mixed with
religious and
moral panic. Toe inclusion of The Autobiography of Malcolm X
on the
approved list seemingly offended Alice Moore not because ofits
frank
discussion of white supremacy but rather due to Malcolm's
giving "all
praise to Allah" that he was no longer a "brainwashed
Christian." Jack
Maurice, editor of the local newspaper, attributed the
controversy to
the "renewal of the theological dispute ... pitting the
Fundamental-
ists against the Modernists ... the Literalists in their
interpretation of
scripture, against the Symbolists." As opposed to traditionalism,
the
modernist educators glorified, in Moore's words, "self-
actualization, "
"clarification of their own values," and the dangerous idea that
"truth
is whatever is truth to that individual." For the Kanawha
conserva-
tives, such relativism was a slippery slope to a host of
dangerous anti-
Christian ideologies. As one parent remembered: "They were
teach-
ing my kids socialism, homosexuality, and situational ethics."13

Toe NEA sent a panel of educators to Kanawha County in
Decem-
ber 1974 to hold hearings on the nature and scope of the
protests.
Toe panel issued a final report recognizing that religious
differences
moved the protestors to action. "For generations, a
fundamentalist
religious belief has given meaning to the mountain way of life
and has
given the mountain people the strength to withstand its
hardships."
This echoed how a national correspondent described the
protests: as
"a full-scale eruption of frustrations against a worldly culture
imposed
on an area literally a world apart from the rest of the country."
Though
correct about opposition to cosmopolitan ideas, the
condescending
notion that such anger was isolated to a rural backwater failed
to cap-
ture the growing national dissatisfaction with the increasingly
secular
features of public education in the United States.14
The movement against the secular curriculum was part and
parcel
of the rising Christian Right, in part because it blended so
easily with
the politics of "family values," a new umbrella referent for
concerns
about feminism, abortion, divorce, premarital sex, and gay
rights. Mel
and Norma Gabler, devout Southern Baptists who converted

their
small-town Texas home into a national center for exposing
liberal
bias in the nation's textbooks, said that their main concern was
that
textbooks were "destroying the family" by means of so-called
values
clarification. Interviewed about the West Virginia textbook
brouhaha,
Mel Gabler said: "What really bugged me was that textbooks
seem to
divide the children from their parents, especially the social
studies
which appear to teach the child a philosophy alien to the
parents."
Such pedagogy violated the biblical mandate that parents raise
their
children to be Christians. "Considering Ephesians 6:4, which
tells us
to bring up our children 'in the nurture and admonition of the
Lord,'"
they asked, "can we as Christian parents entrust the education
of our
children to current textbooks?" The Gablers became enormously
in-
fluential. This owed in part to the fact that they lived in Texas,
where
citizens were automatically granted a hearing before the state
board of
education. As the Gablers became trusted fixtures at board
meetings,
publishers were forced to tailor books to pass muster with them.
And
�ince Texas was one of the nation's largest textbook
purchasers, giving

1t the power to dictate to the national textbook market, the
Gablers'
eological inspections had far-reaching implications. Yet their
influ-
78 CHAPTER THREE
ence resulted from more than mere coincidence of geography.
Their
message was convincing. And they were far from alone in their
holy
war against secular schools.15
Some of the most influential evangelical writers of the 1970s,
m-
cluding Francis Schaeffer and Tim LaHay e, placed education at
the
center of their plans to redeem American culture. They
contended
that the schools had been taken over by an elite who sought to
spread
an anti-Christian ideology they termed "secular humanism:' In
the
religious conservative imagination, secular
humanism_re_placed c�m-
munism as the alien ideology most threatening to Christian
America.
Rousas John Rushdoony, an evangelical intellectual who
founded the
somewhat theocratic Christian Reconstructionist movement,
taught
conservatives that secular humanism rationalized a blasphemous
cul-

ture because it was a hubristic philosophy of "man striving to be
God."
In this way, the critique of secular humanism allowed
conservatives
to make sense of previously unimaginable cultural trends, such
as the
teaching of sex in the public schools. Such manifestations of
cultural
decadence were the logical consequences of a society's
abandonment
of long-standing traditions rooted in biblical tenets.16
Although Christian Right rhetoric about the dangers posed by
sec-
ular humanism was overstated, the United States had indeed
become
a more secular nation. Proof of this was not necessarily found in
the
growing number of Americans who adhered to the cr�ed set
for� in
the 1933 Humanist Manifesto: "that the nature of the uruverse
depicted
by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or
cosmic
guarantees of human values." Yes, the number of secularists,
natural-
ists, humanists, freethinkers, and atheists increased throughout
the
twentieth century, owing much to the fact that universities,
secular-
izing institutions par excel lence, bulked so large in the culture.
But
the United States remained an extremely religious nation,
particularly
relative to nations of comparable wealth. Gallup polls from the
1950s

through the end of the century showed that upwards of 90
percent of
Americans claimed to believe in God.17
Twentieth-century America became more secular due not to a
lapse in the number of religious people but rather �o a wan�g
in �e
scope of religious authority. The most obvious engme of this
decline
was the Supreme Court's revolution in constitutional
interpretation,,
which radically redrew the boundaries between church and
state. In
its 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing
Township, the
Taking God's Country Back
79
court applied the First Amendment's establishment clause to the
states. This reinterpretation of incorporation then led to a series
of
cases that strengthened individual rights relative to religious or
moral
authority. All of a sudden, viewing obscene material in private
was le-
gal, but organized prayer and Bible reading in school were
not.18
The paradox of American secularization-the perplexing fact that
religious authority dwindled even as the vast majority of
Americans
doggedly persisted in religious belief-helps explain the culture
wars.
White Protestant moral authority, which extended beyond the
reli-

gious sphere for most of American history, had been put on the
de-
fensive. Conservative Christians, formerly part of the
establishment,
had come to see themselves as cultural counterrevolutionaries.
Fore-
grounding such a counterrevolution was the fact that for many
con-
servatives, particularly white evangelicals, religion expressed a
larger
national identity. Christianity was crucial to a normative
framework
of Americanism. One of the primary aspirations of the Christian
Right
was to reestablish, in the words of philosopher Charles Tay lor,
an "un-
derstanding that used to define the nation, where being
American
would once more have a connection with theism, with being
'one na-
tion under God,' or at least with the ethic which was interwoven
with
this." But as Tay lor also posits, "the very embattled nature of
these at-
tempts shows how we have slid out of the old dispensation." In
other
words, the Christian Right's emergence was predicated on a
secular
shift. Its efforts to return the sacred to the realm of national
politics
were in symbiosis with secularization.19
Despite the interdependent relationship between secularization
and the growth of the Religious Right, the culture wars were not
only a
battle between religious and secular Americans; they were also

an in-
ternal feature of American Protestantism. Some Protestant
thinkers,
especially mainline Protestants, who tended to be more liberal
than
their evangelical counterparts in both theology and politics,
sought to
radically adjust their doctrines to the eartli-shattering
epistemologi-
cal implications of modernity. Conservative evangelicals, in
contrast,
�sponded to the challenges of modernity with doctrinal and
political
reaction. This intra-Protestant struggle played out at the 1979
Southern
Baptist Convention (SBC), where conservatives who felt
threatened
by modern sexual mores-feminism, abortion, and gay rights-
took
�ontrol of the SBC, to the dismay of their more moderate
coreligion-
ists. Conservatives elected as their new president Adrian
Rogers, a
Bo CHAPTER THREE
Memphis pastor whose platform urged that the SBC return to
the prin-
ciples of "conservative, Bible-believing congregations ... that
believe
in the inerrant, infallible word of God." Given that the SBC was
the na-
tion's largest Protestant denomination, the Christian Right's
political

fortunes grew rosier after the SBC's 1979 political jump to the
right.20
That evangelicals resisted some of the implications of
modernity
is not to say that they did not find ways to accommodate moder-
nity, with the qualification that accommodation did not entail
agree-
ment or, much less, wholesale adoption. The influence of
evangelical
thinker Francis Schaeffer demonstrated that conservative
Protestant-
ism found ways to adjust to secular modernity and that the
Christian
Right was both reactionary and often innovative. Schaeffer
furnished
evangelical Christianity-despite the notorious fundamentalist
insis-
tence upon doctrinal purity-with an ecumenical spirit, at least in
its willingness to form political alliances with nonevangelical
conser-
vatives. Such an ecumenical disposition was crucial to the
Christian
Right culture wars. "It is little exaggeration," James Sire writes,
with
just a touch of exaggeration, "to say that if Schaeffer had not
lived,
historians of the future looking back on these decades would
have to
invent him in order to explain what happened."21
Schaeffer, the hippielike evangelical sage ofL'Abri, a Swiss
moun-
tain retreat for Christian and non-Christian wanderers alike,
became
famous in the 1970s, late in his life, when his books and

documen-
tary films touched millions of American evangelicals. Growing
up
in working-class Pennsylvania, Schaeffer had been "saved" at a
tent
revival in 1929. His theology was shaped by the great debates
of the
1920s, when his mentor J. Graham Machen was fired from
Princeton
Theological Seminary for maintaining fundamentalist beliefs at
a time
when liberal theologians-those who more actively reconciled
their
faiths to modernist thought, including Darwinism-were on the
rise.
Schaeffer attended Westminster Theological Seminary in
Philadel-
phia, which Machen founded as a conservative alternative to the
more
liberal divinity schools. He pastored a number of churches in
the United
States before moving to Switzerland as a missionary in 194 7.
After fun-
damentalist firebrand Carl McIntire astonishingly accused him
of be-
ing a communist and fired him from the mission, Schaeffer and
his
wife Edith founded L'Abri in 1955. Although charging
Schaeffer with
communism was outrageous even by the standards of McIntire,
living
in Europe had indeed led Schaeffer to reject the pietism of
American
Taking God's Country Back g1

evangelicalism and to embrace a more modern spiritualism, part
and
parcel of his newfound interest in art, music, and philosophy.22
Edith Schaeffer, the child of Christian fundamentalist
missionar-
ies, was also a persuasively modernist force in her husband's
life. Toe
product of a privileged upbringing in a mission in China, Edith
pas-
sionately loved high culture. But she was not always happy
about the
tension inherent to being both a cultural highbrow and a
Christian
fundamentalist. Her son Franky remembers his mother's
defensive
objections to H. L. Mencken's antifundamentalist caricatures:
"We're
not like that! He would never have written those horrible things
if he
had ever met me!" Franky, who ultimately rejected his parents'
the-
ology, puts a somewhat different spin on their seemingly
oxymoronic
combination of fundamentalism and high culture. "I think my
father
lived with a tremendous tension," he writes, "that pitted his
grow-
ing interest in art, culture, music, and history against a stunted
the-
ology frozen in the modernist-fundamentalist battles of his
youthful
Christian experience." Rather than stunting, however, this
modernist-
fundamentalist tension lent great significance to Schaeffer's
role: he

helped American evangelicals reconcile their fundamentalist
readings
of scripture to modernity, or at least modernity shorn of
modernist
epistemologies. In order to do battle with modernity, Schaeffer's
the-
ology incorporated all that he had learned from modernist
forms.
"Dad spent his life trying to somehow reconcile the angry
theology
that typified movement-fundamentalism with a Christian
apologetic
that was more attractive."23
Schaeffer's reckoning with the acids of modernity helped
reshape
evangelical thought. Like early-twentieth-century evangelicals
who
read Nietzsche in order to better relate their theology to modern
America, Schaeffer grappled with modernist giants in order to
re-
invigorate fundamentalism. He also tangled with modish artists
and
musicians. "In the early '6os," his son bragged, "he was
probably the
only fundamentalist who had even heard of Bob Dylan."
Schaeffer's
method-what he called his "Christian apologetic," a system of
thought
for relating the meaning of modern cultural forms to scripture-
thus
gave biblical inerrancy a wider currency by certifying it for a
new
generation. Of course, being conversant in countercultural
music
�d not necessarily translate into eschewing that old-time

religion.
Like so many other evangelical thinkers during the 1970s,
including
lantankerous would-be theocrats like Rushdoony, Schaeffer had
an
82
CHAPTER THREE
overarching philosophical mission to demonstrate
the flaws in sec-
ular humanism, which he defined as "the system w
hereby men and
women, beginning absolutely by themselves, try rat
ionally to build
out from themselves, having only Man as their inte
gration point, to
find all knowledge, meaning and value."
24
Schaeffer believed himself to be one of the only thinke
rs who truly
grasped the anxieties that modernity presented peop
le with. He theo-
rized that Western society, by adopting secular huma
nism as its orga-

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