On Fri, 10 Jun 2005, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
> i think this makes an awful lot of sense, as a partial explanation....
> what i'm curious about, though, is how you think that
> romantic-individual-dissent element relates to the theocratic
> evangelicalism dominating the american religious landscape today?
Jeffrey, I haven't forgotten about you. It's just that after a couple of a hours my answer got rather long even by my generous standards. I think it's an interesting answer, but now that I've begun to get into it I'm not sure when I'll be done -- might be days, could be months. But so as not to be rude, I'd like answer for the moment in a short outline, if I could.
[First one footnote applying to my last post. "Dissent protestantism" is a technical descriptive term. It means "everything that isn't the state church." In a place without a state church, everything is dissent protestantism. It's a traditional usage that makes sense in a comparative context. But it has no inherent connection with the term dissent as commonly used, not even religious dissent, because in a country without a state church, there paradoxically isn't anything to dissent from. Sorry if that wasn't clear.]
Okay, now, how would I bring the story up to the present? Obviously we would have to deal with several crucial turning points that happened in the 20th century.
The first turning point is of course the birth of fundamentalism in the 1920s.
The second is its entry into politics, which really started in the 50s and 60s with the reaction against the Warren Court.
The third, shortly thereafter, was the beginning of the entry of the South into national politics in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Until then, due to a kink in the political system going back to the civil war (and ultimately to the birth of the republic, which is what led to the civil war), the south's views on religion and almost anything else besides race didn't matter in Presidential politics at all because it always voted for the Democratic candidate no matter how much it loathed him. And they loathed FDR and Adlai Stevenson even more than they loathed Clinton. But every state in the Deep South voted for them.
This led to a very weird kind of politics, a one-party state where, like in all one party states, voting for the other side was considered treachery to your country, and this was not meant in metaphorical terms. If you did it, people boycotted your store or your law practice or whatever is you did. That was the kind of loyalty and punishment that was necessary to make people vote for what they considered the party of party of Negroes and labor pointy-heads. And it was relentless. If you exclude 7 outlier districts (in every sense of the word) in the peripheral south, out of 2500 elections between 1900 and 1950, the Republicans won 7.
The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act unkinked this weird connection, and the South began its movement toward its natural place in the political spectrum. But it took three decades for Republican identification to take over the South, for reasons that are fairly obvious but a little complicated to explain. And it is entirely necessary to go into in detail, because this point has a lot of ramifications, and has led to a lot of misunderstanding, and most of all, a lot of mistaking of effect for cause. But I'll do that some other day. Let me just say for the moment that it can be boiled down to three terms: seniority, majority, and party loyalty.
The style of politics we have in America today is not the cause of the Republican majority, but rather the result. It is the importation into the national arena of the Southern political style where your opponent is considered literally a traitor to the Cause. Southern Republicans were not only formed in this style, they were forced by their history and circumstances to intensify it.
The Republican realignment of the south was as historically inevitable as something can be historically inevitable. In some ways the Republican claims to credit are like the rooster claiming credit for the dawn. It is the length of the delay that obscures what should be obvious. In 1964, all 22 Southern senators were Democrats. In 1989, only 7 had changed to Republicans. But in the 90s, trends and counter-trends that had been steadily following out their course reached a tipping point and the long-delayed avalanche occurred. Southern congressional and Senatorial delegations suddenly turned Republican in massive amounts. And this is why in the 90s what had long been the political style of the South suddenly became the dominant style of the nation, to the complete shock of the rest of the nation. It wasn't the style that produced the avalanche. It was the avalanche that produced the style.
And this is why fundamentalism finally mattered: because that perverse kink that had the most conservative people in the nation loyally voting for the nation's more liberal party had finally been unkinked. When the Democrats had the South, they never had to listen to the South on cultural matters. They barely had to listen to them at all on national matters except on race. The South was an autonomous minority within the party. But now that the Republicans have the South they do have to listen to them because they are them. They are the dominant force in their party.
And their party itself more powerful than the Democrats were precisely because it isn't kinked. It doesn't have a powerful autonomous minority facing the opposite direction. And as soon as they got into power, the Republicans began changing the rules to make sure it could never happen to them.
What allowed the South to stay Democratic all that time was seniority. It was seniority that allowed Southern senatorial committee chairmen to be virtual Barons, powers in their own right, unremovable by the party leadership no matter how much they spit in its eye, and dominant over the Senate.
The Republicans are doing everything they can to remove the seniority system and replace it with a normal party system, where the leaders of the party decide who runs the committees. In the abstract, there's a lot to be said for that, actually. In many ways, seniority was a nuts system. The reason they're doing it is because they can, and the reason the Democrats didn't was because they couldn't. But this is why the Republicans are able to be so much more effective than the Democrats were when they had the built-in advantage of the South being spotted to them.
It is also why party politics in America is suddenly so polarized and ideological. It only takes the shortest moment of fresh reflection to realize that this is what a two party system ought to naturally gravitate towards: to polarize society into two sides. So why didn't it happen for all those years nay century? Because of this constitutive kink in American politics. All that guff political scientists have been handing out for all these years about how the two party system naturally tends toward moderation is nonsense. It wasn't the system that led to lack of ideology. It was this conjunctural, constitutive kink that led to it in spite of the system. And now it's gone and it's not coming back. And neither is that kind of politics. But we have to distinguish between ideological clarity and demonization. They have fundamentally different origins; one comes from the system and one comes from the history of the South; one is healthful and one is bad; and you can have one without the other.
So that's where we are now. It may seem far afield, but it is crucial to understand how much of the present-day political significance of religion has *resulted from* rather than caused fundamental changes in the political landscape before we can clearly discuss the political weight of religion. And it is important to realize just how much that political landscape has permanently changed before we can appreciate our true situation and talk intelligently about the task facing us, which is in many ways historically new.
But having done all this preliminary work -- and you see how long it is even in outline -- I'd like to say a few words about religion and politics.
The uniqueness of American religion that I discussed before has not gone away. There is a paradoxical tendency to treat the rise of fundamentalism as both an atavism and a return to type. It can't be both, and in fact it is neither. The relation between religion and politics in America was nothing like Europe before, and it is even less like it now. There has been an epochal sea change. But is not (as people seem implicitly to be assuming) that America has suddenly become what Europe was like 200 years ago. And the solution is definitely not to try and apply what worked in Europe then. Anti-clericalism worked in Europe because of the nature of its religion and politics, which grew out of history.
European state religions were always part of the established order. Religion in those countries was always fundamentally conservative. But historically, religion in America has been predominately progressive. It was a major force behind abolition, behind suffragettism, behind populism, behind progressivism, behind socialism (during its heyday, up to WWI, in both its party and aristocratic forms, in both politics and social work), behind cold war liberalism, behind the civil rights movement and behind the anti-war movement. In all those cases -- which is almost all of American history (oh and btw, they were for the revolution too) -- the balance of the politically organized religious forces was for progressive change.
This is completely unlike the main trend of European history, where you have a tradition of Christian Democracy that is always on the right, and leftist parties that always contain the national anti-clericalist tradition. America is not like that, it never was like that, and it will never be like that. And acting like it is -- applying the methods that seemed to work there mutatis mutandis here -- is like fighting with your head in a bag. You might hit the right target by accident, but you'll more likely hit people you have nothing against, making enemies at random, and being comically easy to outwit by your true opponent.
So the politically organized religious right is a major historical departure from American history. It is not a return to some sort of Platonic form, as if religion were always conservative. European religion was always conservative as a political force. But American religion never was before.
To put it in a nutshell, in America, religion has never been something for progressives to fear in itself. And it should not be our enemy now. The divide in America that is important is not between religion and non-religion. In *Europe* that was the line between conservative and liberal because there was in each country a single religious establishment that opposed democratization. But in the multiple world of America, religion was always on both sides, and it's on both sides now.
Lastly but not leastly. The thing that has made the American experience of religion unique -- its voluntary aspect -- has not only been the basis for its retained fervor. It has also been the basis for the uniquely American concept of identity as something that is chosen rather than ascribed. This is a bedrock of the left, and it is a bedrock of America. And it is the potential on which we should build. The divide in America has never been between religious and secular. It is between tolerant and intolerant. In Europe, if you were religious, you were conservative. In America that has never been true. There have always been religious people on both sides in large numbers and there still are today. And it had to be thus, and it will always be thus, because of the determining and formative feature of America religion, which is its multiplicity.
The original birth of fundamentalism in the 1920s was an intra-church affair. It was a moment when all the major denominations in America split in half between mainstream and fundamentalist wings. The religious war we are fighting at present is consequently mostly an inter-church affair. But it is still fundamentally a cleavage within religion, not between religion and secular.
The people who are on the front lines of this battle -- or who should be on the front lines -- are religious liberals. They are the only ones who *can* be on the front line because they are the only ones who have anything to say to the people who live there. We, at the far secular end of the scale, do not. But it is vitally important to us that our side win. And for that to happen, it is vitally important that we see it as our side.
People bemoan that religious liberals haven't taken up the cudgels in force for our side. But why on earth should they? How can they possibly consider us their side, or convince anyone else that we are, if we attack beliefs in god and angels -- beliefs they hold -- as inherently heinous and moronic?
Anti-clericalism makes no sense in America. But what does make sense is identity politics -- which is something that makes no sense in Europe. (It's really very amusing to read German intellectuals talk in the newspapers about multiculturalism, which they do all the time, let me tell you. It's not that they are stupid. On the contrary, they are kind of like the guy in that Woody Allen story who was so intellectual he couldn't understand mime. It is simply comical how foreign the idea is to them -- just as foreign as the idea was 2 centuries ago that a country could allow complete religious enfranchisement, give rise to literally dozens of sects, and have it not only *not* lead to religious war, but to a quantum leap in the feeling of national identity. They didn't understand it then, and they still don't. And frankly, we've never explained it very well, even to ourselves.)
Religion is not to be understood as failed science. It is identity politics. It is the creation of personal and collective identities -- and the two necessarily go together -- that allow people to feel like their lives have meaning which is a fundamental component of happiness. They are not deluded, any more than people who like to live in master/slave relationships are deluded. Both ways of life look completely absurd to most practitioners of the other. But if they don't infringe on you personally -- in the strongest sense of personally, which doesn't include offending your tender sensibilities through public display -- then you should respect their right to be happy and treat their symbols with a respect that comes out of that. That's the American way. And that's the way we secular pagans should look at religion in America. There is nothing wrong with a belief in God or the in Devil, there is nothing wrong with being a Christian or a Wiccan. The only thing that is wrong is when you impose your beliefs on others and stand between them and their god-given pursuit of happiness. That is un-American. That we can stand up and fight for and win with. On that, we have a majority.
But that's is not at all the same, and is almost the opposite, as attacking religion. True European anti-clericalism was an alternative form of imposing one's beliefs on others. And however effective it was in its native milieu, it was -- and is -- just as un-American.
So that's our historically determined choice. We can stand up for tolerance as the absolute god-given right of every American to believe in any creed or religion no matter how absurd so long their practice doesn't impinge on their fellow Americans' rights to practice their own absurdities.
Or we can attack religion as the root of all evil.
In the first case, we are the Americans, attacking the un-Americans. And in the second case we are the un-Americans, attacking the Americans.
I wonder which strategy would give us the better odds ;o)
Michael