There is a Culture War, after all

Ben Domenech furnishes this link to this Daily Standard article - The Party of Unbelievers, which in turn leads to this The Public Interest article on Our secularist Democratic party You can read the Daily Standard article for a synopsis of the Public Interest piece, which is the present "cultural war" occurred because of the 1972 capture of the Democratic Party by a secularly oriented voting block. The Public Interest article looks at various surveys, including one that measures affinity or antagonism by way of a questionaire that generates a feeling thermometer. The Standard article explains this point:

Another striking finding is the intensity of many secularists' dislike of conservative Christians--vastly greater than any dislike of Jews of Catholics discernible in the survey data from the University of Michigan that the authors analyze. "One has to reach back to pre-New Deal America," they write, "when political divisions between Catholics and Protestants encapsulated local ethno-cultural cleavages over prohibition, immigration, public education, and blue laws, to find a period when voting behavior was influenced by this degree of antipathy toward a religious group."

Even though I am anything but a fundamentalist, my gut feeling is that this is an accurate statement. Popular depictions of fundamentalists in the media and statements that one hears on the street would immediately be recognized as bigoted if directed against any other group. Again, to be candid, there are popular stereotypes of the "low church Protestants" concerning their education, intelligence, emotional stability, mental flexibility. [Look, don't blame me for listing these stereotypes. Everyone knows this. Think about the Captain Frank Burns character in MASH who was characterized as a "sky pilot" and then unmercifully persecuted by his zany roommates. Or choose any of a number of other depictions of a "bible thumper" character. Oddly, one of the most favorable depictions of fundamentalists was in an X-File episode where the fundies turned out be right and the moderate-liberal pastor was Satan.] But, of course, since "christians" are viewed as the majority, and not a minority group, complaints that such depictions are pandering to bigotry are quickly dismissed. Frankly, there will have to be a dramatic reorientation of the social weltenschauung before the idea that such depictions constitute a form of pernicious group libel could be sold.

Other interesting details from the Public Interest article:

The average rating white Christian fundamentalists gave to Jews was a warm 66 degrees, a finding consistent with ANES surveys reaching back over a decade. It was no different from the mean ratings that Catholics and mainline Protestants gave to Jews. Among respondents who could correctly identify both Lieberman's and Gore's religious affiliation, Christian fundamentalists felt significantly warmer toward Lieberman (56 degrees) than toward Gore, a Southern Baptist (42 degrees). Disapproval of Lieberman came not from Christian fundamentalists but from secularists, who complained that his public professions of faith and piety blurred the line between religion and politics, and from cultural conservatives who suspected that Lieberman's post-convention stances on issues like partial-birth abortion and school vouchers were more in tune with the secularist tilt of the Democratic party than with his pre-convention positions, thought to be anchored in his religious orthodoxy.

Amazing. Supposedly narrow minded fundamentalists supported Lieberman over Gore. That doesn't fit the popular stereotype, now does it?

Appropos of proving anti-christian bias, check out quote in the next paragraph below. [I am having a problem with using the term Christian here. What I am describing really is distinct from traditional anti-Catholicism. Christian in this context really refers to "low church protestant," and if someone has a better term, let me know. Side note: the low church protestant tradition is really the radical christian tradition, which is contrasted with the magisterial protestant tradition of the likes of Luther, Zwingli and Calvin. Hence, in the future, I will refer to the "radical christian" tradition in lieu of "christian" or "low church protestant." Second side note: If these findings are correct anti-Catholicism will not be a product of the "usual suspects" - the radical christian element. Rather it will come out of the secular oriented sector of society - the non-religious.]

Anyhow, here's the quote:

In terms of their size and party loyalty, secularists today are as important to the Democratic party as another key Democratic constituency, organized labor. In the 2000 election, for example, both secularists and union members comprised about 16 percent of the white electorate, and both backed Gore with two-thirds of their votes. The religious gap among white voters in the 1992, 1996, and 2000 presidential elections was more important than other demographic and social cleavages in the electorate; it was much larger than the gender gap and more significant than any combination of differences in education, income, occupation, age, marital status, and regional groupings. The importance of evangelicals to the ascendancy of the Republican party since the 1980s has been pointed out ad nauseam by media elites. But if the GOP can be labeled the party of religious conservatives, the Democrats, with equal validity, can be called the secularist party.

The increased religious polarization of the electorate has given rise to a new type of voter: the anti-fundamentalist. We discovered this when we examined one group of ANES respondents: those who rated Christian fundamentalists 35 degrees or below on ANES's scale. We wanted to find out whether elite hostility to Christian fundamentalists, clearly apparent in the convention delegate surveys, had filtered into broader segments of the public. In ANES's 2000 survey, about a quarter of white respondents met the anti-fundamentalist criterion, rating fundamentalists 35 degrees or below. For comparison purposes, only 1 percent felt this antagonistic toward Jews and about 2.5 percent expressed this degree of hostility toward blacks and Catholics. ANES results indicate that anti-fundamentalism appears disproportionately among secularists, the highly educated, particularly those living in big cities, and persons who strongly favor legalized abortion and gay rights, oppose prayer in schools, and who, ironically, "strongly agree" that one should be tolerant of persons whose moral standards are different from one's own.

The results indicate that over the past decade persons who intensely dislike fundamentalist Christians have found a partisan home in the Democratic party. Clinton captured 80 percent of these voters in his victories over President Bush in 1992 and over Senator Robert Dole four years later; Gore picked up 70 percent of the anti-fundamentalist vote in the 2000 election. One has to reach back to pre-New Deal America, when political divisions between Catholics and Protestants encapsulated local ethno-cultural cleavages over prohibition, immigration, public education, and blue laws, to find a period when voting behavior was influenced by this degree of antipathy toward a religious group.

In short, a major political party is dominated by a group of voters who, incidentally, are viscerally biased against fundamentalists. Is it unfair to assert that these attitudes make their way into policy decisions? For example, how much of the current opposition to the Boy Scouts arises from that organization's pro-religious orientation? Perhaps even more importantly, how much of the FBI's policies on Waco and Ruby Ridge were informed by latent attitudes concerning the fundamentalists involved in those situations? What about the fever pitch of legal interest over the relatively trivial policy issue of creches in civic Christmas displays? Or the fairly recent legal intuition that phrases like "In God We Trust" or "ONe Nation under God" violate the First Amendment?

Should there be a policy concern about discrimination against fundamentalists, as there is, for example, is with respect to Hispanic-Americans? I don't think such concerns are taken seriously and based on my own experience, I suspect that a complaint with the Department of Fair Employment and Housing alleging anti-fundamentalist discrimination would languish in obscurity before being round-filed.

To be clear, we are not talking about Nuremburg laws being passed against the fundamentalists. But anybody reading this information ought to recognize the need for more sensitive toward this minority group. In fact, perhaps there should even be sensitivity training classes concerning fundamentalism and they shoud be given extra points in the interest of diversity. [Of course, I'm being facetious, but isn't it hypocritical of the proponents of such measures to pick and choose among the groups they feel are entitled to such treatment? Just asking.]

Update: I knew this would happen. My low church Protestant partner Penner told me this morning that he was tired of being referred to as a "low church" Protestant. As far as I know, the term "low church" wasn't intended to denigrate the tenets of its adherents. Rather, the term is to contrast the "high church" Protestants that maintain more ritual and liturgical elements, which in turn may have its cognate roots in "High Mass." On the other hand, the term "low church" does have connotations of the social status of the originally adherents of the radical Protestant tradition, which back in the Sixteenth Century was in the "lower orders" of society as compared to the adherents of the magisterial Protestant traditions, like the Lutherans, which included nobility, and the Calvinists, which had succesful towns people, respectively, as their backbones.