A lot like the old conservatism — of the 1960s
This is the most interesting piece I’ve read in a while about the religious right in our time. But it all sounds so familiar to me ….
A new kind of conservatism, represented by right-wing elites like Ron DeSantis, Christopher Rufo and Tucker Carlson, is making itself known. We are just beginning to see its impact. The anti-critical-race-theory laws, anti-transgender laws and parental rights bills that have swept the country in recent years are the movement’s opening shots. They have made today’s culture wars as fierce as they have been in decades. But this new campaign is also distinctly different from the culture wars of the late 20th century, and it reflects a broad shift in conservatism’s priorities and worldview.
The conservative political project is no longer specifically Christian. That may seem strange to say at a moment when a mostly Catholic conservative majority on the Supreme Court appears poised to overturn Roe v. Wade. But a reversal of the landmark 1973 ruling would be more of a last gasp than a sign of strength for the religious right. It’s hard to imagine today’s culture warriors taking any interest in the 1950s push for a Christian amendment to the Constitution, for example. Instead of an explicitly biblical focus on issues like school prayer, no-fault divorce and homosexuality, the new coalition is focused on questions of national identity, social integrity and political alienation. Although it enjoys the support of most Republican Christians who formed the electoral backbone of the old Moral Majority, it is a social conservatism rather than a religious one, revolving around race relations, identity politics, immigration and the teaching of American history.
Today’s culture war is being waged not between religion and secularism but between groups that the Catholic writer Matthew Schmitz has described as “the woke and the unwoke.” “Catholic traditionalists, Orthodox Jews, Middle American small-business owners and skeptical liberal atheists may not seem to have much in common,” he wrote in 2020. But all of those demographics are uncomfortable with the progressive social agenda of the post-Obama years.
Rather than invocations of Scripture, the right’s appeal is a defense of a broader, beleaguered American way of life. For example, the language of parental rights is rarely, if ever, religious, but it speaks to the pervasive sense that American families are fighting back against progressive ideologues over control of the classroom. That framing has been effective: According to a March Politico poll, for example, American voters favored the key provision of Florida’s hotly debated Parental Rights in Education law, known by its critics as the Don’t Say Gay law, by a margin of 16 percentage points. Support for the initiative crosses racial lines. In a May poll of likely general election voters in six Senate battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the conservative American Principles Project found that Hispanics supported the Florida law by a margin of 11 percentage points and African Americans by a margin of four points.
The upshot is that this new politics has the capacity to dramatically expand the Republican tent. It appeals to a wide range of Americans, many of whom had been put off by the old conservatism’s explicitly religious sheen and don’t quite see themselves as Republicans yet. As the terms of the culture war shift, Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” — the mix of millennials, racial minorities and college-educated white voters whose collective electoral power was supposed to establish a sustainable progressive majority — is fraying, undermining the decades-long conventional wisdom that America’s increasing racial diversity would inevitably push the country left.
That thesis was prominently advanced by the progressive political scientists John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, but both of them have grown alarmed about the rightward movement among nonwhite voters in recent years. “If Hispanic voting trends continue to move steadily against the Democrats, the pro-Democratic effect of nonwhite population growth will be blunted, if not canceled out entirely,” Mr. Teixeira wrote in December. “That could — or should — provoke quite a sea change in Democratic thinking.” In the absence of that sea change, however, it is likely that disaffected people of all races will continue to move into the Republican coalition.
But is all this good for American conservatism? Particularly for social conservatives older than I am, who have sustained a long string of losses in the culture war, the potential for a new Republican majority is nothing to sniff at. But some have already expressed misgivings about this coalition. “We must not allow evangelical political priorities to be co-opted by functional pagans simply because we share a limited set of political objectives,” wrote Andrew T. Walker, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Pushing back on “woke lunacy” is valuable, he said, but it may not be worth embracing a politics that “causes Christians to adopt or excuse the disposition of cruelty and licentiousness.” As of now, the new secular conservatives and the old religious right are bound together in an uneasy partnership to fight the cultural left. But they may yet find themselves at odds about the country’s future.
[…]
The decline in Republican church membership directly coincides with the rise of Mr. Trump. As Timothy P. Carney found in 2019, the voters who went for Mr. Trump in the 2016 primary were far more secular than the religious right: In the 2016 G.O.P. primaries, Mr. Trump won only about 32 percent of voters who went to church more than once a week. In contrast, he secured about half of those who went “a few times a year,” 55 percent of those who “seldom” attend and 62 percent of Republicans who never go to church. In other words, Mr. Carney wrote, “every step down in church attendance brought a step up in Trump support, and vice versa.”
The right’s new culture war represents the worldview of people the sociologist Donald Warren called “Middle American radicals,” or M.A.Rs. This demographic, which makes up the heart of Mr. Trump’s electoral base, is composed primarily of non-college-educated middle- and lower-middle-class white people, and it is characterized by a populist hostility to elite pieties that often converges with the old social conservatism. But M.A.Rs do not share the same religious moral commitments as their devoutly Christian counterparts, both in their political views and in their lifestyles. As Ross Douthat noted, nonchurchgoing Trump voters are “less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced” than those who regularly attend religious services. No coincidence, then, that a 2021 Gallup poll showed 55 percent of Republicans now support gay marriage — up from just 28 percent in 2011.
These voters are more nationalistic and less amenable to multiculturalism than their religious peers, and they profess a skepticism of the cosmopolitan open-society arguments for free trade and mass immigration that have been made by neoliberals and neoconservatives alike. “M.A.Rs feel they are members of an exploited class — excluded from real political representation, harmed by conventional tax and trade policies, victimized by crime and social deviance and denigrated by popular culture and elite institutions,” Matthew Rose wrote in “First Things.” They “unapologetically place citizens over foreigners, majorities over minorities, the native-born over recent immigrants, the normal over the transgressive and fidelity to a homeland over cosmopolitan ideals.”
In this sense, the fierceness of today’s culture wars is actually tied to the decline in organized religion. Frequent church attendance is correlated with more negative attitudes toward gay men, lesbians and feminists, but as the pollster Emily Ekins noted in 2018, it softened respondents’ views of culture war issues such as race, immigration and identity. Nonchurchgoing Trump voters are more likely to support a border wall, tighter restrictions on legal immigration and a ban on immigration to the United States from some Muslim-majority countries. They are less inclined to agree that “acceptance of racial and religious diversity is at the core of American identity.” While the majority of religious conservatives eventually fell in line behind Mr. Trump, the political and cultural energy he represented was primarily a reflection of the nonreligious right.
Oh, and the seculars don’t like uppity gays and feminists either (the good ones who know how to act are ok) and are perfectly willing to outlaw abortions as long as their daughter or girlfriend can get one somewhere if she needs it. They HATE transgender people so that is one subject on which they are in perfect accord with the religious right.
This writer sees this new right as being in ascendancy and delivering where the religious right was unable to do so because it has harnessed this secular, white working class grievance (he doesn’t put it that way) to dominate the “woke left.”
Well, maybe. But he neglects one thing in this analysis: age. He notes that there is tension between the libertarian/libertine right that could cause a fracture. (I have my doubts because most conservative Christians are hypocrites, which he exemplifies, but that’s another story.) But he doesn’t seem to notice that the largest generations in the country are Millennials and Gen Z — and they are very, very woke.
Just as it was in the 60s, these people are on a collision course with their own children.
Stay tuned. If you can, read the whole thing in the NY Times. The writer is a religious right believer who is basically exposing his own capitulation to a bunch of racist homophobes — and celebrating because they may be able to deliver on his pet issues. It’s clarifying.