Who Started the Culture Wars, Anyway?
Mother Jones
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A couple of days ago Paul Waldman wrote about Persecuted, a new movie that features a Christian evangelist who gets framed for murder by an evil senator and then spends the rest of the film running from government agents. It all sounds pretty silly, and it’s come in for plenty of mockery on the left. But after watching the trailer, I have to say that it didn’t sound much sillier than plenty of other movies and TV shows I’ve seen. In Hollywood, evil businessmen have done a lot worse than this to environmental activists and the CIA has done a lot worse to national security whistleblowers.
So fine. Why not make a silly movie about a persecuted evangelist instead of a persecuted journalist trying to expose the CIA? It’s not my cup of paranoid thriller tea, but all of us enjoy being paranoid about different things. And I was happy to see that, unlike many lefties, Waldman concedes that right-wing Christian paranoia isn’t completely ridiculous:
But liberals should acknowledge that for more fundamentalist Christians, there’s a genuine feeling that underlies their fears. In many ways, the contemporary world really has turned against them. Society has decided that their beliefs about family—in which sex before marriage is shameful and wicked, and women are subordinate to their husbands—are antiquated and worthy of ridicule. Their contempt for gay people went from universal to acceptable to controversial to deplorable in a relatively short amount of time. If you are actually convinced that, in the words of possible future senator and current congressman Paul Broun, “I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old,” then modern geology is an outright assault on your most fundamental beliefs. And so is biology and physics and many other branches of science.
And it’s not just changing culture. Over the last half century, various branches of government have also taken plenty of proactive steps to marginalize religion. Prayer in public school has been banned. Creches can no longer be set up in front of city hall. Parochial schools are forbidden from receiving public funds. The Ten Commandments can’t be displayed in courtrooms. Catholic hospitals are required to cover contraceptives for their employees. Gay marriage is legal in more than a dozen states and the number is growing rapidly.
Needless to say, I consider these and plenty of other actions to be proper public policy. I support them all. But they’re real things. Conservative Christians who feel under attack may be partly the victims of cynical politicians and media moguls, and a lot of their pity-party attempts at victimization really are ridiculous. But their fears do have a basis in reality. To a large extent, it’s the left that started the culture wars, and we should hardly be surprised that it provoked a strong response. In fact, it’s a sign that we’re doing something right.
As far as I’m concerned, the culture wars are one of the left’s greatest achievements. Our culture needed changing, and we should take the credit for it. Too often, though, we pretend that it’s entirely a manufactured outrage of the right, kept alive solely by wild fantasies and fever swamp paranoia. That doesn’t just sell the right short, it sells the left short too. It’s our fight. We started it, and we should be proud of it.
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