Posted on by Mark Movsesian

The Culture Wars, 30 Years Later

Thirty years ago, scholar James Davison Hunter coined the phrase, “the culture wars,” to describe American social dynamics at the end of the Cold War. The wars have only intensified–so much so, in fact, that people now use a new term, “polarization,” to describe what is going on. More and more, it seems the Enlightenment settlement between rationalism and Christianity that characterized American culture has unraveled. (Stay tuned for my new Legal Spirits interview with Dan McCarthy, in which we discuss this topic). What will come next? Can America hold together?

Hunter, the LaBrosse-Levinson Distinguished Professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory and executive director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, has a new book on the subject, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis. The publisher is Yale University Press. Anything by Hunter on this subject is self-recommending. Here’s Yale’s description:

The long-developing cultural divisions beneath our present political crisis
 
Liberal democracy in America has always contained contradictions—most notably, a noble but abstract commitment to freedom, justice, and equality that, tragically, has seldom been realized in practice. While these contradictions have caused dissent and even violence, there was always an underlying and evolving solidarity drawn from the cultural resources of America’s “hybrid Enlightenment.”
 
James Davison Hunter, who introduced the concept of “culture wars” thirty years ago, tells us in this new book that those historic sources of national solidarity have now largely dissolved. While a deepening political polarization is the most obvious sign of this, the true problem is not polarization per se but the absence of cultural resources to work through what divides us. The destructive logic that has filled the void only makes bridging our differences more challenging. In the end, all political regimes require some level of unity. If it cannot be generated organically, it will be imposed by force.
 
Can America’s political crisis be fixed? Can an Enlightenment-era institution—liberal democracy—survive and thrive in a post-Enlightenment world? If, for some, salvaging the older sources of national solidarity is neither possible sociologically, nor desirable politically or ethically, what cultural resources will support liberal democracy in the future?

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Wilkinson, “All Falling Faiths”

The Sixties won the Culture Wars. Or, perhaps it’s better to say, the Sixties are winning; Culture Wars never really end. That Sixties culture dominates America today is obvious, and many celebrate that fact. Some aspects of Sixties culture in fact are worthy of celebration. But not all, and not everybody is celebrating. Earlier year, Encounter Books published an assessment of the Sixties by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, All Falling Faiths: Reflections on the Promise and Failure of the 1960s. Here’s the publisher’s description:

all-falling-faithsIn this warm and intimate memoir Judge Wilkinson delivers a chilling message. The 1960s inflicted enormous damage on our country; even at this very hour we see the decade’s imprint in so much of what we say and do. The chapters reveal the harm done to the true meaning of education, to our capacity for lasting personal commitments, to our respect for the rule of law, to our sense of rootedness and home, to our desire for service, to our capacity for national unity, to our need for the sustenance of faith. Judge Wilkinson does not seek to lecture but to share in the most personal sense what life was like in the 1960s, and to describe the influence of those frighteningly eventful years upon the present day.

Judge Wilkinson acknowledges the good things accomplished by the Sixties and nourishes the belief that we can learn from that decade ways to build a better future. But he asks his own generation to recognize its youthful mistakes and pleads with future generations not to repeat them. The author’s voice is one of love and hope for America. But our national prospects depend on facing honestly the full magnitude of all we lost during one momentous decade and of all we must now recover.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Four Pieces on Culture Warring–Inevitable, Interminable, Permanent

For one reason or another, a number of people in the blogosphere have been writing culture war posts in the last few days. Perhaps it’s the end of the year, or the looming political changes, or exam avoidance, or just the holiday cheer. For those who are interested, have a look at Mark Tushnet’s recent post, Paul Horwitz’s response, and this rather grim comment by R.J. Snell–all of them culture war related.

But the piece I really want to highlight is alluded to in the Snell post–Philip Rieff’s “The Newer Noises of War in the Second Culture Camp: Notes on Professor Burt’s Legal Fictions,” published in 1991 and in response to Robert Burt’s then-recent book, “Two Jewish Justices: Outcasts in the Promised Land.” I cannot do justice to the entire piece, but here is a fragment that is, in its way, responsive to each of the three posts above:

Let there be fight? And there was. And there is. James Joyce’s pun, on the words of Jewish second world creation, Genesis 1:3, is more than mildly amusing; it gives readers the most exact and concise account I know of the sociological form of culture. Culture is the form of fighting before the firing actually begins. Every culture declares peace on its own inevitably political terms. Unless a culture is defeated politically, as the Jewish was from the Roman conquest to the founding of Israel, it will assert itself politically. A living culture, even one that imitates life by politicizing its cultural impoverishment, works for itself. That cultural work is the matter and manner of disarming competing cultures, inside and outside its previously bounded self. In its disarming manner, a culture makes the ultimate political means of enforcement, armed force, unnecessary….

12) Kulturkampf. The German compound word for the disarming force/form of culture has an awkward English equivalent: culture/struggle. As I remarked in the first note, the punning polemical genius of Joyce brought him closer than any sociologist I know to both the formal fighting sense of culture and its superordinate creative sense. It is in that both/and that the historical task of culture is always and everywhere the same: the creation of a world in which its inhabitants may find themselves at home and yet accommodate the stranger without yielding their habitus to him. Here and now, pluralism has its price: a united front of second against third world assaults [for Rieff’s discussion of first, second, and third worlds, see earlier in the piece], which are often mounted in the name of pluralism.

13) Origins of kulturkampf. Law is the ultimate weapon, before any turn to harder ware, in a kulturkampf. That word first appeared in common German use in the early 1870’s during the struggle of the National Liberal political party to disarm by law the moral/educational authority, and political pulpitry, of a triumphalist Roman Catholic hierarchy, revitalized as it then was by its dogma of papal infallibility in matters of faith and morals. The aim of the National Liberals was to shift the German Catholic imagination away from the church to the state. The Pope responded to newly restrictive laws by forbidding clerical conformity to them. In turn, the state dismissed clerical resisters from their duties and, moreover, suspended their state salaries. Elites of the kulturstaat, both Catholic and Protestant, then learned a fatally rational and enduring lesson: the high price of being other than indifferent to the temptation of opposing the machtstaat.

Posted on by Christina Vlahos

Kaveny, “Prophecy Without Contempt”

In March, the Harvard University Press will release “Prophecy Without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square,” by Cathleen Kaveny (Boston College).  The publisher’s description follows:

American culture warriors have plenty to argue about, but battles over such issues as abortion and torture have as much to do with rhetorical 9780674495036style as moral substance. Cathleen Kaveny reframes the debate about religion in the public square by focusing on a powerful stream of religious discourse in American political speech: the Biblical rhetoric of prophetic indictment.

Throughout American history, reformers of all political persuasions and for all manner of causes—abolitionists, defenders of slavery, prohibitionists, and civil rights leaders—have echoed the thundering condemnations of the Hebrew prophets in decrying what they see as social evils. Rooted in the denunciations of Puritan sermons, prophetic rhetoric has evolved to match the politics of an increasingly pluralistic society. To employ prophetic indictment in political speech is to claim to speak from a position of unassailable authority—whether God, reason, or common sense—in order to accuse opponents of violating a fundamental law.

The fiery rhetoric of prophetic indictment operates very differently from the cooler language of practical deliberation and policy analysis. Kaveny contends that prophetic indictment is a form of “moral chemotherapy”: it can be strong medicine against moral cancers threatening the body politic, but administered injudiciously, it can do more harm than good. Kaveny draws upon a wide array of sources to develop criteria for the constructive use of prophetic indictment. In modern times, Martin Luther King Jr. exemplifies the use of prophetic rhetoric to facilitate reform and reconciliation rather than revenge.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 1 Comment

Now Comes the “Museum of the Bible”

This story reports on the arrival in Washington, D.C. of a new museum, the “Museum of the Bible,” whose collection will include “pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a Gilgamesh tablet, Elvis Presley’s Bible and about 850 manuscripts, 12 of which are in Hebrew and come from China’s Jewish population. A third of the material may be considered Judaica, related to Judaism and the Old Testament, including torahs that survived the Spanish inquisition and the Nazis.”

Notwithstanding this scattershot miscellany, the story seems determined to find a controversial church-state angle. It reports that the museum is the creature of Hobby Lobby President Steve Green and that its proposed location near the Mall might well overshadow a downtown skyline that is “dominated by monuments to men.” Objections to the museum appear to combine the aesthetic, the religious, and the ideological: e.g., “To many in the scholarly community, the museum seems like an oversize piece of evangelical claptrap”; “The museum will be a living, breathing testament to how American evangelicalism can at once claim it is under siege from secularists, the LGBT rights movement, or feminism — yet also boast of acquiring a prime private perch, strategically located at the nation’s epicenter of law and politics.”

But perhaps all of this is too much fuss over a development that secular critics of

"Creation" Museum
“Creation” Museum

the museum might welcome. Artifacts that get their own museums are probably on their way out culturally. Museums generally involve subjects and events that are in some way closed affairs–affairs to be studied and reflected on retrospectively. Proust recognized as much when he spoke of the movement to turn French cathedrals into museums in the early 20th century, which he pronounced “the death of the Cathedral.”

As for the American religion that needs defending against the assault of the museum, that’s nearly perfectly summarized in the first paragraph of the story (though the final word “instead” seems entirely out of place):

In Washington, separation of church and state isn’t just a principle of governance, it’s an architectural and geographic rule as well. Pierre L’Enfant envisioned a national church on Eighth Street. A patent office was built on the site instead.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

American Freedom and Catholic Power

It was only a matter of time before this sort of thing was bound to appear, though perhaps it is somewhat disappointing to see it in the pages of US News and World Report. The specific claim seems to be that by granting an emergency stay in the Little Sisters of the Poor case, Justice Sotomayor is waging a “war on women” because she is imposing her Catholic views on the rest of the nation in violation of the law. But that claim is buried within lots of other mud, and I’m afraid I can’t do justice to it without letting much of the rest hatch out:

The lady from the Bronx just dropped the ball on American women and girls as surely as she did the sparkling ball at midnight on New Year’s Eve in Times Square. Or maybe she’s just a good Catholic girl.

The Supreme Court is now best understood as the Extreme Court. One big reason why is that six out of nine Justices are Catholic. Let’s be forthright about that. (The other three are Jewish.) Sotomayor, appointed by President Obama, is a Catholic who put her religion ahead of her jurisprudence. What a surprise, but that is no small thing….

Sotomayor’s blow brings us to confront an uncomfortable reality. More than WASPS, Methodists, Jews, Quakers or Baptists, Catholics often try to impose their beliefs on you, me, public discourse and institutions. Especially if “you” are female. This is not true of all Catholics – just look at House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. But right now, the climate is so cold when it comes to defending our settled legal ground that Sotomayor’s stay is tantamount to selling out the sisterhood. And sisterhood is not as powerful as it used to be, ladies.

Catholics in high places of power have the most trouble, I’ve noticed, practicing the separation of church and state. The pugnacious Catholic Justice, Antonin Scalia, is the most aggressive offender on the Court, but not the only one. Of course, we can’t know for sure what Sotomayor was thinking, but it seems she has joined the ranks of the five Republican Catholic men on the John Roberts Court in showing a clear religious bias when it comes to women’s rights and liberties. We can no longer be silent about this. Thomas Jefferson, the principal champion of the separation between state and church, was thinking particularly of pernicious Rome in his writings. He deeply distrusted the narrowness of Vatican hegemony.

Now, as it happens, I am Catholic. And, as it also happens, on the legal merits, I am persuaded that the statutory argument in favor of the Little Sisters of the Poor as to the issue of accommodation of non-exempted nonprofits is strong–stronger than the arguments the government advances. I also believe that a strong free exercise clause claim can be made in light of the individualized exemptions that have been meted out, though to date this argument is generally not being made. These are all legal claims, and so to the extent that any judge agrees with these claims, it would seem to me that they are putting the law first in ruling as they do. Others disagree with my legal views, and they, too, are putting the law first. They are acting and speaking appropriately about their views of the law–in good faith and by their best lights. I think it is a terrible error to believe that anytime a person disagrees with one’s legal views, the reason must be that they are acting in bad faith.

I will say that outside of the legal fight, and as to larger political questions, I do not see why exempting the members of “a nunnery” (as the author so tenderly puts it) from the compulsion to be provided with free access to contraception would constitute a Catholic war on women. I am informed that the members of the Little Sisters of the Poor are women. They seem not to want these products. I don’t believe anybody is waging a war on anybody else; it degrades the horror of war to speak in these terms. And yet, if anyone is conducting a hostile campaign against women, it is those seeking to compel these women to do what they don’t want to do.

Furthermore, if the author were even marginally more serious about providing evidence for her claims, she might have investigated how many of the other judges who have granted injunctions in these cases–18 other such courts, by my current count, and more judges than that–are Catholic. If they are all Catholic, is it also her view that they are all imposing Catholicism on the nation in violation of the law? If they are not all Catholic, what explains their legal findings? Are they all imposing their non-Catholic religious views notwithstanding the law? What if some of the judges who granted injunctions have no religious affiliation? Are they also imposing their non-religious views in finding for the Little Sisters? Or is it only when a judge is Catholic that it can be assumed that she is imposing her views? And what about the judges who denied injunctions? Are any of them Catholic? If they are not, are they imposing their views on the rest of us too? If they are Catholic, I suppose one could claim that they are the good sort of Catholic—Catholics like Nancy Pelosi, as the author puts it–judges who don’t impose their views at all. Still, it would be useful to have this information in order to assess the cogency of the claims.

I recognize that for people who write columns like this one, arguments of this sort are not likely to be persuasive. Indeed, once Ms. Stiehm identifies the source (me), she will surely dismiss out of hand anything that follows without bothering to read it. That is regrettable, but it follows directly from the reality that Ms. Stiehm is not really interested in law or argument at all. She’s interested in rhetoric; unfortunately the rhetoric that interests her is sloppy and misinformed.

Here is a different uncomfortable reality that columns like this should compel us to face. The long history of American hatred of Catholics is alive, and well, and flourishing. It is kept in fine and proud form by people like this, and given space to breathe in all kinds of prominent venues. It will intensify in the months and years ahead. Dark times are coming.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Reid on “The Devil Comes to Kansas”

Professor Charles Reid (U. St. Thomas law) has posted a fun piece, The Devil Comes to Kansas: A Story of Free Love and the Law, which discusses one of the earliest American cases in which various notions of privacy and “freedom of choice” were first raised and which, as Professor Reid says, have become watchwords of modern constitutional law.  The abstract follows.  — MOD

State v. Walker (1887) is an important but hitherto neglected landmark case in the development of the right of privacy. The case involved the “autonomistic” or “free-love” marriage of Edwin C. Walker and Lillian Harman, daughter of Moses Harman, the radical newspaperman.

Edwin and Lillian, who rejected state control over marriage, proclaimed themselves married in the fall of 1887, although they declared that their union was neither permanent or exclusive. Prosecuted for illegal cohabitation because of their refusal to obtain a marriage license, they and their defenders developed a vocabulary that would profoundly influence the future path of American law.

Their supporters in the radical press began to speak of the right of women to control their own bodies, woman’s right to reproductive autonomy, and a right of sexual privacy. Indeed, it was in the midst of this controversy that the expression “freedom of choice” was used, probably for the first time, in its modern meaning by Lillian Harman writing from prison. Read more