This awful year has offered few glimpses of hope. But one of them has been dawning since May. That is the possibility that Donald Trump and his decadent version of the Republican Party may go down to a substantial national defeat in November, which may usher in a much-needed political realignment in our tortured land.
Here’s a big-picture view.
There have been two major cultural currents in our country since the late 1960s. The first of these is a liberationist trend. The second is a reactionary trend in response to the liberationist trend. These two competing trends have come to dominate and divide our law, culture, politics, media and religion.
Liberationists want to set people free. Free from patriarchy — e.g., feminism. Free from sexual repression — e.g., the sexual revolution. Free from mandatory lifetime marriage — e.g., easy legal access to divorce. Free from mandatory childbearing when pregnant — e.g., easy legal access to abortion. Free from heterosexism — e.g., the LGBTQ movement. Free from white supremacy and its toxic effects — e.g., movements for Black and brown and indigenous civic equality, liberation, justice, empowerment. Free from Christian domination — e.g., secularism or efforts toward a multifaith public square.
Reactionaries want to defeat liberation movements. Their default posture is to attempt to preserve the old ways, by law, in cultural norms and practices, and through resistant subcultures when the legal and cultural battles are lost.
It helps to name as many of the liberation movements as one can to see their varied progress toward success. You need some gray hair to remember when there were vivid public debates over no-fault divorce and women working outside the home. Those 1960s/1970s debates were long ago lost in law and culture by the conservative side, and traditionalist views and practices survive mainly in religious subcultures.
Liberationist change is happening more gradually on LGBTQ rights, with victories in culture and most of public law and plenty of remaining, if declining, opposition. Abortion rights are entrenched in law but also still contested in law and culture. The move to end Christian domination of American culture — and, simply put, the growing organic trend of the same — has advanced considerably in the last few years. The fight to finally end white supremacism is still awful, vivid and unresolved, but the events following the murder of George Floyd seem to have advanced that crucial cause at least a bit.
“You need some gray hair to remember when there were vivid public debates over no-fault divorce and women working outside the home.”
One more-or-less neutral way to name the two sides might be “old culture” and “new culture.” The old culture was dominated by white straight conservative Christian men and reflected the dominant views of the world from which they came. The new culture consists of groups previously marginalized plus new voices who have arrived in recent decades, all fighting for their place in the sun. The old culture (mostly) likes the old ways and wants to preserve them. The new culture (mostly) dislikes the old ways and wants to defeat them.
At a Christian ethical level, each one of these social trends is worthy of careful analysis. Unless one is a knee-jerk reactionary, or down-the-line liberationist, each specific issue needs to be evaluated independently.
For example, I am all for ending white supremacism and also squeamish about abortion and divorce as routine social practices. I am all for LGBTQ dignity, equality and inclusion and also have not abandoned a marital-covenantal sexual ethic. I am all for a multifaith public square but not enthused about secularism. And so on.
It is also true that there are plenty of people who are ambivalent about details, or pace, or potential future scenarios in relation to some of these areas or issues. There is much complexity here.
But such complexity gets vaporized by partisan politics. It did not happen quickly that our two dominant political parties became absorbed into a liberationist vs. reactionary frame. By now, though, the Republican Party has become the reactionary party, while the Democratic Party has become the liberationist party. Significant exceptions are few and fading. This has not been healthy for our politics, which have become apocalyptic, moralistic and filled with mutual righteous outrage.
As the political conventions take place over the next two weeks, and the polls show a steady lead for Joe Biden, I am wondering whether this tectonic struggle between old culture Christian traditionalism and new culture multifaith liberationism is about to be resolved in favor of the latter.
I think it might be. If the GOP loses big, in part due to COVID, in part due to a national allergic reaction to Donald Trump (who offers full-on reactionary politics with none of the traditional Christian virtues), and in part due to the combination of Joe Biden’s comforting liberal-but-not-radical Catholic grandpa vibe with Kamala Harris’ embodiment of a multiracial and multifaith version of America, we might finally see an end to this awful stalemate between liberation and reaction.
“As the 50/50 struggle finally comes to an end, laws might again be passable and national problems might again be solvable.”
A clear victory of one side (at last) would perhaps have the benefit of making the country governable again. As the 50/50 struggle finally comes to an end, laws might again be passable and national problems might again be solvable.
A clear Democratic victory would, though, leave an “old culture” contingent of a third of the population feeling even more aggrieved and endangered. If the Democrats overreach, if they rub salt in the culture-wars sore spots by pressing too hard on old-culture institutions, if they needlessly insult the already aggrieved, then there will be no cultural peace.
But if the Democrats govern competently, keep the small persuadable middle with them, and stay away from anti-conservative crusades, they could consolidate a period of Democratic rule for quite a long time. In the end, this would advance in a culturally irreversible way the liberationist values that they have embraced — for better and for worse.
Still, at that point our politics could start becoming routine rather than apocalyptic. As questions about our basic identity as a nation were no longer up for bitter debate every single day, our politicians might return to doing basic boring tasks like writing budgets, passing laws and paving roads.
What a relief that would be.
David P. Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University. He is the past-president of both the American Academy of Religion and Society of Christian Ethics. He is an author or editor of 25 books, including Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust, Kingdom Ethics, The Sacredness of Human Life, and Changing Our Mind. Gushee’s newest release, After Evangelicalism, will be out later this month. He earned the Ph.D. from Union Seminary. David and his wife, Jeanie, live in Atlanta.
