The Golden Cage

Thanks to Lora for extending the discussion on my last post.  I relish exchanges with my colleagues here at S-USIH.

I have an extension of my own: if Bellah and Kennan felt trapped by their own eloquence, can the inverse happen?  Can the golden cage of a term or concept release the author and entrap the culture?

The example I have in mind here is Richard John Neuhaus's use of the term, "the naked public square."  His 1984 book by that name, appearing in an election year and at a moment of impasse for the Religious Right, captured a transition in perils from the cold war to, perhaps, the culture wars.  Among the most remarkable features of the book is the limited discussion of communism--the specter that had provoked calls-to-arms of all kinds, secular and religious, since the late 1940s. But that peril had faded as a new peril was identified, manufactured, and endlessly debated. Neuhaus defined that new peril, Mary Ann Glendon asserted in a retrospective on Neuhaus's book: "Richard Neuhaus correctly saw that the chief threat to our republic was not communism (as many people thought at the time), but 'a collapse of the idea of freedom and of social arrangements necessary to sustaining a liberal democracy.'"

Before the publication of The Naked Public Square, Neuhaus had been a fascinating but not necessarily influential public intellectual.  As many know, he started his adult life as a Lutheran minister and pastor of a church in Brooklyn; a man of the religious left who marched with Martin Luther King and joined other religious leaders in opposing the Vietnam War.  By the mid-1970s he had begun to migrate away from the radical critique of the United States as a hopeless nation--fallen, perhaps, but Neuhaus argued it was redeemable.  By the early 1980s, he made an ill-fated alliance with a group of "paleocons" and in the aftermath of a minor fiasco founded the Institute for Religion and Public Life and the journal First Things.  In less than a decade he would enter the Roman Catholic Church as a priest and take up a place squarely at the center of the culture wars that defined the decade prior to 9/11.  At various times, Neuhaus expressed surprise that his book and the metaphor he used struck such a vibrant chord with so many people.  His fellow religious and conservative intellectuals had already come to admire him by 1984 but his presence at debates about the fate of American life undoubtedly grew more essential after the publication of his book.

Yet, one of the questions I wrestle with is whether his metaphor trapped the discussion about American life in a way that concepts launched by Bellah and Kennan had trapped them.  Neuhaus's public life benefited from the reception of his metaphor, but what did that metaphor do to the culture it attempted to describe?  Both Bellah and Kennan lamented the fact that their professional careers became defined by terms that they felt ambivalent about.  Their ambivalence seemed to come from finding the world around them too complex for simplification by terms such as civil religion and containment.  I don't know if Neuhaus had similar misgivings, but it seems to me that the golden cage that Bellah and Kennan felt trapped within did not prompt similar misgivings with Neuhaus. What "the naked public square" did as a concept was set the terms of a debate Americans have been having one way or another every since Neuhaus introduced it.  The 2007 issue of American Quarterly entitled "Is the Public Square Still Naked?" stands as a decent example of that.  Likewise the well-regarded religious historian Steven P. Miller recently took up the iconic metaphors of Neuhaus and James Davison Hunter in a paper at the 2012 AHA.  Is there significance in the different ways Bellah, Kennan, and Neuhaus (and perhaps Hunter) related to their iconic concepts?

The Albatross Concept

I have had a brief exchange with sociologist Robert Bellah about my characterization in God and War of his 1967 essay, "Civil Religion in America."  The gist of the exchange would not surprise any one who has even a passing understanding of Bellah's relationship to the concept.  Almost from the moment his essay appeared he sought to distance himself from what became the popular implications of the term--that America had a collection of ideals that generations of its people could appeal to as a kind of normative faith.  Obviously, Bellah had good reason to disavow such a notion.  If we continue to search for the elusive/illusive singular American civil religion that will guide a consistently troubled nation, we will suffer the fate of Captain Ahab.

Bellah's response to me made me think of another allegory, the one to right: the plight of the mariner in Samuel Taylor Coleridge famous poem.  The albatross hangs around the mariner's neck as a reminder of an action with almost mythical portents.  It was, at first, an act that guided the ship and its crew to safety but its legacy led to great regret, felt most acutely by the mariner himself.  Bellah relationship to civil religion has not ended his career nor condemned his nation to some awful fate--in short he is not to blame for American ideological rigidity, stupidity, or naiveté.  But his desire to downplay the significance of his particular relationship to civil religion demonstrates a curious intellectual problem--the Albatross Concept.

Bellah published his essay on American civil religion in 1967 in the midst of the Vietnam War and in the middle of debates about the origins and responsibility of the cold war.  He was not the only scholar wondering what the times said about the identity and ideals that many Americans believed were in jeopardy (or that even existed).  Sidney Mead and Sidney Ahlstrom both wrote in this vein.  But Bellah's deployment of civil religion struck a particular chord with scholars because, it seems to me, he summarized ideas and sensibilities that were swirling around his era--everything from the secularization of the west to the rise of religious conservatives promoting the nation as a divine entity.  And even though Bellah had no plans to develop this term any further--he was a scholar of Japan and, more broadly, the sociology of religion--he became saddled with civil religion for the better part of his professional career.

This is the second such person I have worked on who had to endure a similar problem.  I wrote my master's thesis at SUNY Albany on George F. Kennan and worked with John Lewis Gaddis (the Pulitzer Prize winning-biographer of Kennan) at Ohio University.  Kennan, of course, went down in history as the "father" of the containment doctrine.  Containment was, for lack of almost any other real competitor, the foreign policy of the American cold war.  Kennan's authorship of this concept derives from his "long telegram" of 1946 and his "Mr. X" article in 1947.  From relative obscurity, Kennan rose rapidly in the U.S. State Department on the strength of these two documents.  Very much like Bellah, Kennan's distinction lay in his ability to bring together streams of thought that had been circulating throughout the upper levels of government and intellectual life; he provided eloquence and clarity to ideas that would have existed in disparate ways without him.  But his use of the containment did appear and did strike a chord with the right people at the right time.  And, also like Bellah, Kennan spent the rest of his life distancing himself from the implications of a term that hung on him (and I don't think this is too dramatic to say) like a dead albatross.

The albatross concept is a curious problem to have.  I think most of us would be fairly pleased to have a  well-known idea associated almost exclusively with something we had written.  I don't know this for certain, but I imagine James Davison Hunter has enjoyed his run with "the culture wars."  At the same time, though, Bellah's scholarship has almost nothing to do with American civil religion.  As he reminded me, his book The Broken Covenant (a text I channeled but did not dwell on in God and War) is a thumping conclusion to his relationship with civil religion. And yet, I find Bellah's original essay to be such a fascinating historical window on to a time that he captured.  But like Kennan, Bellah's reflection of a historical moment came through a term that lived long beyond its author's intention.  For that reason, the term itself has had a life outside of the author (as all terms do, of course) but will, for better and worse, pull the author along as it weaves its way through history.  As much as Bellah and Kennan and others would like to disengage from those terms that define part of their lives, they--the authors and the terms--become historical partners.  And the albatross remains.

Culture Wars Trump Sectarian Strife

As Ben pointed out yesterday, the Republican presidential ticket consists of a Mormon and a Catholic. This is remarkable given that the GOP has been home to the vast majority of America’s large white evangelical population: by many counts, almost 80% of white evangelicals voted for Nixon in 1972, and almost 70% for Reagan in 1980. Reagan’s 1980 electoral haul of white evangelicals particularly demonstrated GOP strength with that demographic since his interest in B’hai, astrology, and the Shroud of Turin, not to mention his divorce, hardly made him theologically palatable to white evangelicals in relation to his white, born-again evangelical counterpart Jimmy Carter (even given Reagan’s Hal Lindsey-inspired propensity for premillennial dispensationalism). But what is more remarkable than the theological diversity of the GOP ticket is that this fact seems rather unremarkable to so many people. What explains this?

Whose Family Values?

It’s the culture wars, stupid. That is, the culture wars are the reason that the American right—including conservative white evangelicals—is fine with the GOP's relatively newfound love of religious diversity. As James Davison Hunter pointed out more than two decades ago in his now classic book, Culture Wars, religious Americans gave up their sectarian prejudices in order to form political and ideological alliances in the culture wars. Conservative evangelicals came to love, or at least tolerate, conservative Catholics, Jews, and even Mormons. These “orthodox” Americans, to borrow Hunter’s language, found that they had more in common with each other than they did with “progressive” Americans, more even than with progressive coreligionists. This was also, remarkably, true of most Protestant fundamentalists, those whose identities were formed earlier in the twentieth century by sectarian strife and doctrinal dispute. Many fundamentalists, for example, believed that the election of JFK signaled the end times in 1960. And yet, the vast majority of fundamentalists eventually came around to the view that conservative Catholics were their spiritual allies against the secular humanists who ushered in legal abortion. This is why, as I argued last week, a modernist fundamentalist like Francis Schaeffer was so important to the Christian Right. He helped make a limited form of ecumenicalism palatable, especially over the issue of abortion. Jerry Falwell and Randall Terry both claimed that Schaeffer convinced them anti-abortion was not just a Catholic thing.

Abortion was just one issue over which conservative religious Americans found common cause in the 1970s. During that decade theocons were faced with what seemed like 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 should be again. Some of the issues that animated them were explicitly about church and state. Not only had school prayer been rendered unconstitutional, for example, but the IRS was coming after the tax-exempt status of the Christian day schools where millions sent their children for Christian inculcation (not where they sent them, in most cases, to avoid black children). Other issues, less explicitly religious and more about sex and gender, were equally offensive to conservative religious Americans, including abortion, feminism, and gay rights. Combined, these sex- and gender-related issues fell under an umbrella referent new to the 1970s: "family values." Family values, more than anything else, gave life to the culture wars of the Christian Right.

There is now a growing historiography to help us deal with the rise of family values. I will briefly describe two new additions to this literature. The first book is J. Brooks Flippen’s Jimmy Carter, the Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right. In terms of analysis, Flippen does not offer anything new to the larger body of conservatism historiography. Rather, it’s a narrative of how the politics of family values brought conservative Christians together in the political arena during the 1970s, and how issues like abortion became strictly partisan, even virtual Rorschach tests. Like I said, nothing new analytically, but Flippen’s book is extremely well researched and, as such, a good chronological primer on the topic.

The second new book on family values is Robert Self’s All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s. Self’s book is different than Flippen’s in that it’s grander in chronological scope. But more importantly, Self seeks to analyze the most important political transformations of the last fifty years using family values as an analytical window. He argues, to put it in simple terms, that family values rhetoric helped shift American political culture rightward. This narrative is not necessarily new, but Self uses some fresh elocutions. From 1964 to 2004, Self contends that there was a shift from “breadwinner liberalism” to “breadwinner conservatism.” This transformation tracked with the shift in the centripetal rhetorical force in American politics from “equal rights” to “family values.” Like Flippen, Self documents the conservatives who rallied around the family in the 1970s. But he also argues that those who challenged mainstream assumptions about sex and sexuality in the 1960s and afterwards—feminists, gay rights activists, and assorted cultural radicals—unintentionally helped pave the way for “breadwinner conservatism” by rendering “breadwinner liberalism” indefensibly patriarchal. I find this argument compelling—ironic?—and have said so at this blog on several occasions, beginning with this post on a Nancy Fraser articlefrom a few years back, in which she contends that feminism helped pave the road to neoliberalism.

Whether or not the cultural left gave way to neoliberalism is arguable. But what is irrefutable is that the cultural left helped give us the culture wars. In other words, the ways in which the left helped remake the national culture animated its dialectic cultural force, the religious right. And these political, cultural, and religious realignments—the realignments of the culture wars—now matter much more than the old sectarian divisions that often gave rise to American cultural politics.

And here I just wrote a whole blog post implicitly about Paul Ryan without once mentioning Ayn Rand.

Civil Religion and Culture Wars

The greatest culture war in American history led to its most destructive war.  Or so argued James Davison Hunter in Before the Shooting Begins, the 1994 follow-up to his provocative and influential book Culture Wars (1992).  "Culture wars always precede shooting wars," he wrote, "otherwise, as Philip Rieff reminds us, the latter wars are utter madness: outbreaks of the most severe and suicidal efforts to escape the implications of any kind of normative order.  Indeed the last time this country 'debated' issued of human life, personhood, liberty, and the rights of citizenship all together, the result was the bloodiest war ever to take place on this continent, the Civil War." (emphasis in the original)

In the abstract, then, culture wars describe the contest over the question of how a people--a society--ought to order its life together.  Hunter contended that by the early 1990s the national debate over the language people used to describe themselves, their opponents, and their nation had utterly broken down.  Thus the rhetoric of war aptly described the impasse reached in this national conversation. For our own Andrew Hartman, the culture wars describe the messy assembling of new conversations in the wake of the demise of the kind of common culture that Hunter seemed to mourn.  For Hartman, culture wars operate on many levels, rhetorically, philosophically, politically, and socially.  In this way, he offers the term as the defining narrative of postmodern America.

And it is a term with immediate, almost visceral connotations.  As Patrick Buchanan notoriously declared at the 1992 Republican National Convention: "There is a religious war going on in this country.  It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself.  For this war is for the soul of America."  War--Soul--Nation: these are also the elements of a term that is often seen as the opposite of culture wars--civil religion.

Rhetorically, civil religion appears to be opposed to conflict and war; practically, though, it is deeply indebted to both.  For if civil religion is the appropriation of religion by politics, there is nothing more serious for politicians to do than to justify killing and dying, and nothing gets that job done better than coupling religion and war.  If we carry Hunter's statement above to its conclusion we might note how the culture wars begat the Civil War which begat an American civil religion.  Religious historian Harry Stout argued as much in his recent book, Upon the Altar of the Nation: "The Civil War taught Americans that they really were a Union, and it absolutely required a baptism of blood to unveil transcendent dimensions of that union." (xxi)

It is that transcendent understanding of America which has fractured since the 1970s.  And Americans have lived with two overlapping, at times mutually influential spheres of war--the culture wars and wars to affirm an American civil religion.  War is at the heart of the relationship between culture wars and civil religion; war links them, but with an irony. The culture wars emerged in the twilight of the cold war and the humiliating aftermath of Vietnam--in short, in the absence of war, the culture wars had room to grow.  The rise of the culture wars narrative eclipsed the civil religion that had been manufactured from the last years of the Second World War through Vietnam.  And yet, throughout the years of the culture wars--when the language of war grew dominant--a civil religion began to slowly re-emerge, constructed as it has been since the Civil War through a new American experience in war.

When 9/11 happened and God and war came roaring back into political rhetoric, religious scholar Mark Silk captured the moment appropriately.  Writing about George W. Bush's speech at the National Cathedral, Silk observed, "If civil religion is about anything, it's about war and those who die in it."  His comments echoed not merely what he heard from Bush, but what Americans have memorialized from Lincoln--the original culture warrior, who in his Gettysburg Address dedicated the killing and dying that remained in the war to those who had given their last full measure of devotion to the nation and what he hoped that nation might ultimately become. 

We live, therefore, in a space between and within the spheres of culture wars and civil religion. At once appropriating the language and power of war rhetorically to thump our opponents and rally people to our side while we memorialize a mythical nation through the sacrifices made in real war.  If the term 'culture wars' resonates with us more than civil religion it might be because we understand ourselves as a people--both united and divided--through the idea of war.  

The Dilemma that is Stanley Hauerwas

I recently finished Stanley Hauerwas’s memoir entitled Hannah’s Child that appeared in 2010. I like reading Hauerwas and have enjoyed hearing his lectures and, on a rare occasion, seeing him speak. He is witty, sharp, and, it seems to me, forces his listeners—whatever their relationship to religion—to consider what faith is for. He has been at Duke University’s Divinity School for nearly twenty years holding an endowed professorship. As befits his lofty academic position, Hauerwas has been incredibly productive and his scholarship is admirably diverse.

There are many fascinating parts to Hauerwas’s story, among those that are of particular interest to me and my working through of U.S. intellectual history is his recounting of why he came to write on such an array topics, from medical ethics and care for the disabled, to pacifism, the academy, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Even though he is a polymath, he has been tagged by his peers/critics as a particular kind of theologian. In her profile of Hauerwas for Time Magazine, Jean Bethke Elshtain described him as a Christian contrarian who speaks “pacifism” to power in order to remind Americans that they have churches that can stand apart from their frequent worship of the state. Ironically, this profile appeared in the issue that came out a few days after 9/11, a moment that was auspicious for both Hauerwas and Elshtain for the wars that followed hastened an end to their friendship as they took up opposite sides in debates over patriotism and the violence perpetrated in name of the nation.

Hauerwas’s relationship to the state often gets him associated with the Anabaptist tradition in American Protestantism—a critique most recently developed by James Davison Hunter in To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. Through this lens, Hauerwas becomes not merely a critic of actions taken by governments but a theologian who steps outside of politics itself. Hauerwas has certainly contributed to this perception through such works as Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony in which he and his co-author Will Willimon argued that the Christian church imposed obligations and responsibilities on Christians that forced them to consider who or what they worshiped. Of course, Hauerwas seems stubborn in his insistence that Americans do not need to privilege their obligations and responsibilities to their nation above those to their God. A tough challenge for any person who claims dual or dueling allegiances, and one at least worth considering.

In one of Hauerwas’s clearest articulations of this idea he writes: “Theology is the ongoing and never ending attempt to learn this story [of how to worship God] and to locate the contexts that make speech about God work. How theology can at once be about God and about the complexities of human life is never easily rendered. Some theologians in modernity have tried to split the difference between speech about God and the complexities of human life [read: Reinhold Niebuhr], with the result that their theology is more about ‘us’ than about God. When that happens, it is not at all clear that you need the word ‘God’ at all. If my work has seemed to be ‘in your face,’ I think it has been so because I have tried to show that ‘God’ is a necessary word.”

In considering the public role Hauerwas has played over the last three decades, he clearly has not remained (if he ever was) a resident alien. His work has been, as he would be the first to claim, overtly political in the sense that being Christian and considering ethics is nothing if not about power and how we exercise and critique it.

However, I have been teaching about James Madison’s challenge to the way religion became enshrined politically in the founding the American government. I wondered with my students the other day what kind of career someone like Hauerwas would have had if Madison’s recommendation of a strong statement regarding religion had found its way into the Constitution. Instead of Madison’s argument that civil government cannot need religion in order to survive and operate and Americans should have acknowledges that fact clearly, we have a Constitution that promises no state interference in religious worship and that’s about it.

David Sehat in The Myth of American Religious Freedom, a book that I find to be one of the most important to appear in 2011, has made me consider a way to conceive of what Madison wanted: the test for religious freedom is not whether churches flourish, they will or will not based on the people who worship in them, but whether a society supports (not merely tolerates) those who reject religion and, most especially, mainstream religion. In short, religion didn’t need the state and the state didn’t need religion. But that’s not we got. And Tocqueville was perceptive enough to recognize that within a few decades after the ratification of the Constitution, American society had developed a co-dependent relationship with the idea of religion.

Stanley Hauerwas has, in a way, benefited from that relationship, in that his work constantly seems relevant because he challenges the way we speak about God. But at the same time, I read his memoir as recovery of sorts of the dream Madison had of a society in which religions rose and fell without any consequential connection to the health of the state. In the end, there is an irony to Hauerwas’s prominence—like his foil, Reinhold Niebuhr, his fame is based on the way his theology plays a role in the politics of the nation and not in the creation and understanding of Christian ethics. Madison’s warning continues to haunt the religious.

The Culture Wars: Notes Towards a Working Definition

This week was my spring break, which finally allowed me enough time to read Daniel Rodgers, The Age of Fracture in as much depth as it warrants. This post does not serve as a review of the book. I plan to roll out a long review here alongside the panel on Age of Fracture that I’m assembling for the Fourth Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference. (If you want to read a review now, check out these three: Robert Westbrook’s at Book Forum; Lisa Szefel’s at the History News Network; and Nemo’s at PhD Octopus. Also, be on the lookout for a roundtable discussion of Age of Fracture in the next issue of Historically Speaking.)

Let me just say for now that, despite some disagreements I have with Rodgers—some major, some minor—the book is very good. In fact, I think anyone who wishes to write about recent U.S. intellectual history will now have to go through Rodgers. In this sense, I see Age of Fracture catapulting to canon-like lists like the one put together by David earlier this week. In other words, I agree with James Kloppenberg, who writes in a blurb that Age of Fracture is “the most wide-ranging and ambitious interpretation of late-twentieth century American history available.” But like I said, this post is not a book review.

Rather, how Rodgers deals with the culture wars, the topic of my current book project, reminds me that one of my biggest obstacles in writing this book is defining the culture wars. Related to this major hurdle: How do I impose boundaries on a topic that seemingly relates to almost everything of consequence that happened during the 1980s and 1990s? And, of course, none of this even speaks to causation. I’m finding these tasks daunting—it’s given me a clue as to why no historian has yet to write a book specifically on the culture wars.

Rodgers does not define the culture wars that differently from common understandings, though his points of emphasis are somewhat unique. He writes that, in contrast to those who celebrated cultural hybridity and the destabilization of identity, such as avant-garde artists or postmodern English professors:

To release and destabilize not merely goods and fashions but “everything”—tradition, certainties, truth itself—was, for other Americans, a source of fear an outrage. Not until 1991, when James Davison Hunter’s book Culture Wars put the title phrase on every op-ed page, did that unease acquire a general name. For the next decade the term served as a banner for partisans, a verbal crutch for journalists, and the focus of a flourishing industry among academics seeking to explain its novelty and dynamics. In fact, cultural wars in which highly polarized moral values flooded into partisan politics had a long history in the American past. But that did not make their effect in the age of fracture any less important. They helped to mobilize conservative churchgoing Americans into new alliances and new political battles. They split university faculties into feuding intellectual camps. They stoked strident school board contests. They made the fortunes of best-selling books. Across the last quarter of the twentieth century, the emergent talk of fluidity and choice grew in tandem with contrary desires for centers and certainties, each drawing on the other’s energy” (145).

In other words, for Rodgers, the culture wars were a battle between those who celebrated cultural fracture with those who, against all odds, sought to piece the national culture back together out of an older stock. What was this older cultural stock? Many argue race figures foremost. Others point to religious changes that brought more Americans into cultural conflict. But Rodgers contends changes in gender relations, though hardly mutually exclusive from other cultural shifts, were paramount. The culture wars were “above all, in ways that historians of these culture clashes have only begun to realize… a battle over women’s acts and women’s and men’s nature” (145). “The women’s movement and the culture wars,” Rodgers continues, “were to be inextricably bound together. In complicated ways, they were parts of the same story” (146).

I tend to agree with Rodgers here, though like Lisa Szefel I think Rodgers under-emphasizes sexuality more broadly construed, since he only dedicates a little over one page to homosexuality, AIDS, and conservative backlash to gay rights. I also think he might have made more of the ways in which cultural conservatives adjusted to shifting gender norms even as they seemingly rejected such transformations. One of Bethany Moreton’s cleverest points in her award-winning To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise is that Wal-Mart was a key site for men to learn that an ethos of service, framed as an explicitly Christian attitude, was the best adjustment to deindustrialization and the loss of manly work, while still allowing them to maintain patriarchal relations with women, however softened. This ethos spread out nationally, and even internationally, with the Promisekeepers. I contend, similarly, that fighting the culture wars allowed people at all points of the cultural spectrum to adjust to the altered moral, racial, and gendered realities, even if such adjustment often came in the form of rejection or nostalgia.

Although I am still working all of these moving parts out in my mind, one thing seems clear. It’s time to move beyond James Davison Hunter, who set the original terms for how we came to frame the culture wars. This is not to say that his book is anachronistic or beyond use. His exhaustive account of the mutually antagonistic “progressive” and “orthodox” worldviews is crucial in relating the culture wars to changing religious-political affiliations. He usefully demonstrates that Catholics and Protestants (and to a lesser extent, Jews), historically unfriendly almost as a rule, found common cause across faiths on culture war issues such as abortion and homosexuality. However, Hunter altogether ignores intellectual history, a serious omission given that the culture wars were largely fought on terrain forged by intellectuals, whose understandings of contemporary debates were attached to longstanding epistemological disputes over truth, justice, and identity. Here Rodgers offers an important intervention. I hope to offer a substantial one as well.

I also think it’s high time we move beyond the simplistic reading of the culture wars offered by left-liberals like Thomas Frank, E. J. Dionne (Why Americans Hate Politics), and to a lesser extent, Todd Gitlin (The Twilight of Common Dreams). This interpretation has come to operate like conventional wisdom. Take Frank’s popular jeremiad, What’s the Matter with Kansas (now a film, too), where he argues that “culture wars get the goods.” In his typical pithy way, Frank relates the Andres Serrano Piss Christ controversy to this larger point: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, U.S.A.” Frank’s thesis goes as follows: cultural conservatives often voted against their own economic interests due to their irrational obsession with the culture wars, to which Republican politicians cynically lent rhetorical support as they attended to more important matters, such as rewriting the tax codes in favor of the economic royalists.

Similarly, Gitlin argues that the culture wars were a great distraction from more universal problems, such as economic inequality, that should have spoken to everyone, especially left-leaning intellectuals. This paradigm endures. In last year’s Dissent symposium dedicated to the subject “Intellectuals and Their America” (which I analyze at length here) Dionne continues his longstanding critique of the cultural left. “While the political right spent the 1980s and 1990s preaching the gospel of privatization and the virtue of pursuing individual satisfactions,” Dionne writes, “many in the progressive academy engaged in their own form of withdrawal. An aesthetic radicalism replaced political radicalism, and a battle over texts and canons displaced the fight over whose interests would be served by government and whose ideas would define mainstream politics.” Whether blaming a cultural left for fetishizing “identity,” as Gitlin and Dionne do, or accusing a cynical right for baiting and switching their way to power, as Thomas Frank does, this dismissive narrative has proven convincing to many observers, including several historians.

The historiography of the culture wars, though sparse, has begun to move way from What’s the Matter with Kansas oversimplifications, but only to a degree. David Courtwright’s excellent new book, No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America, adds historical weight to Frank’s more impressionistic study. Courtwright convincingly argues that, although the cultural right entered the political arena with a vengeance, it failed to reshape the national culture due to the pervasiveness of countercultural values, which touched most members of the baby boomer generation regardless of ideological orientation. He also shows that where the cultural right failed, the economic right succeeded. This is true as far as it goes.

But in thinking of the culture wars merely as a tool of the political class, and not as something real in their own right, Courtwright adheres to Frank’s thesis that the culture wars should simply be understood as a successful yet cynical Republican tactic: marshalling the spectacle of cultural controversy helped Republicans achieve their more mundane political and economic objectives. Read at the strictly political level, there is merit in this argument. But Courtwright’s political focus is too narrow. In avoiding cultural and intellectual history, Courtwright ignores the issues that I think define the culture wars: the controversies over education, art, museum exhibits, and popular culture. This cultural and intellectual history illuminates the ways in which the culture wars represented something more than mere escapades in exuberant irrationalism.

James Livingston offers a very different perspective in The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century. (For my essay review of this book, go here, and for Livingston’s response, here. I think future graduate seminars on U.S. Intellectual History will, or at least should, assign Livingston alongside Rodgers.) Livingston posits that the left won the ideological battles that have carried over from the Sixties, made evident by its domination of the commanding cultural heights of the university and by its hegemony over popular culture. The left “was never in danger of losing the so-called culture wars.” Here Livingston offers an important intervention: by expanding the interpretative terrain of the culture wars to the realm of intellectual history, his book is a necessary corrective to Courtwright’s narrow political focus. However, Livingston’s intellectual history is too narrow in its own right. He places too high of a premium on the power of the cultural left, as if control over humanities departments and Hollywood was sufficient. Livingston ignores that those cultural realms dominated by conservatives—Congress, evangelical churches, AM radio, conservative think tanks—were equal in influence. In sum, the national culture, what Patrick Buchanan memorably referred to as “the Ho Chi Minh Trail to power,” was up for grabs.

I have yet to settle on a definition or thesis. But I’ll conclude by pasting the thesis statement I wrote in my book proposal—which one reviewer loved, another, not so much. I’m hoping that your comments will help me out! (Remember, the book proposal format calls for grandiosity!)

Here goes:

Most scholars understand the culture wars to have been ephemeral. I argue against that consensus. Although the culture wars were emotional, overstated, and often hyperbolic, they were not necessarily a proxy for more important developments. Rather, I contend that the culture wars are best understood as the terrain that allowed Americans in the 1980s and 1990s to acknowledge, if not accept, the transformations to American life wrought by the tumultuous developments of the 1960s and 1970s. Most explicitly, the culture wars granted Americans space to articulate new understandings of American life in the context of the altered landscapes of race, gender, and religion. Through the culture wars, Americans found new forms of solidarity in the face of an increasingly rudderless and fragmented culture that threw into doubt all foundations. I contend that the culture wars, then, are the defining narrative of postmodern America.

The Culture Wars: Notes Towards a Working Definition

This week was my spring break, which finally allowed me enough time to read Daniel Rodgers, The Age of Fracture in as much depth as it warrants. This post does not serve as a review of the book. I plan to roll out a long review here alongside the panel on Age of Fracture that I’m assembling for the Fourth Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference. (If you want to read a review now, check out these three: Robert Westbrook’s at Book Forum; Lisa Szefel’s at the History News Network; and Nemo’s at PhD Octopus. Also, be on the lookout for a roundtable discussion of Age of Fracture in the next issue of Historically Speaking.)

Let me just say for now that, despite some disagreements I have with Rodgers—some major, some minor—the book is very good. In fact, I think anyone who wishes to write about recent U.S. intellectual history will now have to go through Rodgers. In this sense, I see Age of Fracture catapulting to canon-like lists like the one put together by David earlier this week. In other words, I agree with James Kloppenberg, who writes in a blurb that Age of Fracture is “the most wide-ranging and ambitious interpretation of late-twentieth century American history available.” But like I said, this post is not a book review.

Rather, how Rodgers deals with the culture wars, the topic of my current book project, reminds me that one of my biggest obstacles in writing this book is defining the culture wars. Related to this major hurdle: How do I impose boundaries on a topic that seemingly relates to almost everything of consequence that happened during the 1980s and 1990s? And, of course, none of this even speaks to causation. I’m finding these tasks daunting—it’s given me a clue as to why no historian has yet to write a book specifically on the culture wars.

Rodgers does not define the culture wars that differently from common understandings, though his points of emphasis are somewhat unique. He writes that, in contrast to those who celebrated cultural hybridity and the destabilization of identity, such as avant-garde artists or postmodern English professors:

To release and destabilize not merely goods and fashions but “everything”—tradition, certainties, truth itself—was, for other Americans, a source of fear an outrage. Not until 1991, when James Davison Hunter’s book Culture Wars put the title phrase on every op-ed page, did that unease acquire a general name. For the next decade the term served as a banner for partisans, a verbal crutch for journalists, and the focus of a flourishing industry among academics seeking to explain its novelty and dynamics. In fact, cultural wars in which highly polarized moral values flooded into partisan politics had a long history in the American past. But that did not make their effect in the age of fracture any less important. They helped to mobilize conservative churchgoing Americans into new alliances and new political battles. They split university faculties into feuding intellectual camps. They stoked strident school board contests. They made the fortunes of best-selling books. Across the last quarter of the twentieth century, the emergent talk of fluidity and choice grew in tandem with contrary desires for centers and certainties, each drawing on the other’s energy” (145).

In other words, for Rodgers, the culture wars were a battle between those who celebrated cultural fracture with those who, against all odds, sought to piece the national culture back together out of an older stock. What was this older cultural stock? Many argue race figures foremost. Others point to religious changes that brought more Americans into cultural conflict. But Rodgers contends changes in gender relations, though hardly mutually exclusive from other cultural shifts, were paramount. The culture wars were “above all, in ways that historians of these culture clashes have only begun to realize… a battle over women’s acts and women’s and men’s nature” (145). “The women’s movement and the culture wars,” Rodgers continues, “were to be inextricably bound together. In complicated ways, they were parts of the same story” (146).

I tend to agree with Rodgers here, though like Lisa Szefel I think Rodgers under-emphasizes sexuality more broadly construed, since he only dedicates a little over one page to homosexuality, AIDS, and conservative backlash to gay rights. I also think he might have made more of the ways in which cultural conservatives adjusted to shifting gender norms even as they seemingly rejected such transformations. One of Bethany Moreton’s cleverest points in her award-winning To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise is that Wal-Mart was a key site for men to learn that an ethos of service, framed as an explicitly Christian attitude, was the best adjustment to deindustrialization and the loss of manly work, while still allowing them to maintain patriarchal relations with women, however softened. This ethos spread out nationally, and even internationally, with the Promisekeepers. I contend, similarly, that fighting the culture wars allowed people at all points of the cultural spectrum to adjust to the altered moral, racial, and gendered realities, even if such adjustment often came in the form of rejection or nostalgia.

Although I am still working all of these moving parts out in my mind, one thing seems clear. It’s time to move beyond James Davison Hunter, who set the original terms for how we came to frame the culture wars. This is not to say that his book is anachronistic or beyond use. His exhaustive account of the mutually antagonistic “progressive” and “orthodox” worldviews is crucial in relating the culture wars to changing religious-political affiliations. He usefully demonstrates that Catholics and Protestants (and to a lesser extent, Jews), historically unfriendly almost as a rule, found common cause across faiths on culture war issues such as abortion and homosexuality. However, Hunter altogether ignores intellectual history, a serious omission given that the culture wars were largely fought on terrain forged by intellectuals, whose understandings of contemporary debates were attached to longstanding epistemological disputes over truth, justice, and identity. Here Rodgers offers an important intervention. I hope to offer a substantial one as well.

I also think it’s high time we move beyond the simplistic reading of the culture wars offered by left-liberals like Thomas Frank, E. J. Dionne (Why Americans Hate Politics), and to a lesser extent, Todd Gitlin (The Twilight of Common Dreams). This interpretation has come to operate like conventional wisdom. Take Frank’s popular jeremiad, What’s the Matter with Kansas (now a film, too), where he argues that “culture wars get the goods.” In his typical pithy way, Frank relates the Andres Serrano Piss Christ controversy to this larger point: “Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, U.S.A.” Frank’s thesis goes as follows: cultural conservatives often voted against their own economic interests due to their irrational obsession with the culture wars, to which Republican politicians cynically lent rhetorical support as they attended to more important matters, such as rewriting the tax codes in favor of the economic royalists.

Similarly, Gitlin argues that the culture wars were a great distraction from more universal problems, such as economic inequality, that should have spoken to everyone, especially left-leaning intellectuals. This paradigm endures. In last year’s Dissent symposium dedicated to the subject “Intellectuals and Their America” (which I analyze at length here) Dionne continues his longstanding critique of the cultural left. “While the political right spent the 1980s and 1990s preaching the gospel of privatization and the virtue of pursuing individual satisfactions,” Dionne writes, “many in the progressive academy engaged in their own form of withdrawal. An aesthetic radicalism replaced political radicalism, and a battle over texts and canons displaced the fight over whose interests would be served by government and whose ideas would define mainstream politics.” Whether blaming a cultural left for fetishizing “identity,” as Gitlin and Dionne do, or accusing a cynical right for baiting and switching their way to power, as Thomas Frank does, this dismissive narrative has proven convincing to many observers, including several historians.

The historiography of the culture wars, though sparse, has begun to move way from What’s the Matter with Kansas oversimplifications, but only to a degree. David Courtwright’s excellent new book, No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America, adds historical weight to Frank’s more impressionistic study. Courtwright convincingly argues that, although the cultural right entered the political arena with a vengeance, it failed to reshape the national culture due to the pervasiveness of countercultural values, which touched most members of the baby boomer generation regardless of ideological orientation. He also shows that where the cultural right failed, the economic right succeeded. This is true as far as it goes.

But in thinking of the culture wars merely as a tool of the political class, and not as something real in their own right, Courtwright adheres to Frank’s thesis that the culture wars should simply be understood as a successful yet cynical Republican tactic: marshalling the spectacle of cultural controversy helped Republicans achieve their more mundane political and economic objectives. Read at the strictly political level, there is merit in this argument. But Courtwright’s political focus is too narrow. In avoiding cultural and intellectual history, Courtwright ignores the issues that I think define the culture wars: the controversies over education, art, museum exhibits, and popular culture. This cultural and intellectual history illuminates the ways in which the culture wars represented something more than mere escapades in exuberant irrationalism.

James Livingston offers a very different perspective in The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century. (For my essay review of this book, go here, and for Livingston’s response, here. I think future graduate seminars on U.S. Intellectual History will, or at least should, assign Livingston alongside Rodgers.) Livingston posits that the left won the ideological battles that have carried over from the Sixties, made evident by its domination of the commanding cultural heights of the university and by its hegemony over popular culture. The left “was never in danger of losing the so-called culture wars.” Here Livingston offers an important intervention: by expanding the interpretative terrain of the culture wars to the realm of intellectual history, his book is a necessary corrective to Courtwright’s narrow political focus. However, Livingston’s intellectual history is too narrow in its own right. He places too high of a premium on the power of the cultural left, as if control over humanities departments and Hollywood was sufficient. Livingston ignores that those cultural realms dominated by conservatives—Congress, evangelical churches, AM radio, conservative think tanks—were equal in influence. In sum, the national culture, what Patrick Buchanan memorably referred to as “the Ho Chi Minh Trail to power,” was up for grabs.

I have yet to settle on a definition or thesis. But I’ll conclude by pasting the thesis statement I wrote in my book proposal—which one reviewer loved, another, not so much. I’m hoping that your comments will help me out! (Remember, the book proposal format calls for grandiosity!)

Here goes:

Most scholars understand the culture wars to have been ephemeral. I argue against that consensus. Although the culture wars were emotional, overstated, and often hyperbolic, they were not necessarily a proxy for more important developments. Rather, I contend that the culture wars are best understood as the terrain that allowed Americans in the 1980s and 1990s to acknowledge, if not accept, the transformations to American life wrought by the tumultuous developments of the 1960s and 1970s. Most explicitly, the culture wars granted Americans space to articulate new understandings of American life in the context of the altered landscapes of race, gender, and religion. Through the culture wars, Americans found new forms of solidarity in the face of an increasingly rudderless and fragmented culture that threw into doubt all foundations. I contend that the culture wars, then, are the defining narrative of postmodern America.