Why Liberals Win the Culture Wars (Even When They Lose Elections)

A History of the Religious Battles That Define America from Jefferson's Heresies to Gay Marriage Today

Stephen Prothero

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062098641
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Religion

In this timely, carefully reasoned social history of the United States, the New York Times bestselling author of Religious Literacy and God Is Not One places today's heated culture wars within the context of a centuries-long struggle of right versus left and religious versus secular to reveal how, ultimately, liberals always win.

Though they may seem to be dividing the country irreparably, today's heated cultural and political battles between right and left, Progressives and Tea Party, religious and secular are far from unprecedented. In this engaging and important work, Stephen Prothero reframes the current debate, viewing it as the latest in a number of flashpoints that have shaped our national identity. Prothero takes us on a lively tour through time, bringing into focus the election of 1800, which pitted Calvinists and Federalists against Jeffersonians and "infidels;" the Protestants' campaign against Catholics in the mid-nineteenth century; the anti-Mormon crusade of the Victorian era; the fundamentalist-modernist debates of the 1920s; the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s; and the current crusade against Islam.

As Prothero makes clear, our culture wars have always been religious wars, progressing through the same stages of conservative reaction to liberal victory that eventually benefit all Americans. Drawing on his impressive depth of knowledge and detailed research, he explains how competing religious beliefs have continually molded our political, economic, and sociological discourse and reveals how the conflicts which separate us today, like those that came before, are actually the byproduct of our struggle to come to terms with inclusiveness and ideals of "Americanness." To explore these battles, he reminds us, is to look into the soul of America—and perhaps find essential answers to the questions that beset us.

1

The Jefferson Wars

MOST OF US LIVE in our own world rather than the world that brought it into being, so we tend to assume that our problems are unprecedented. The rage on the right that descended over the United States upon Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration—the analogies to Nazism and socialism, the questioning of the president’s citizenship, the insistence that he was a Muslim (“Islamapologist-in-Chief”)—seemed to many on the left to be wholly new.¹ But American politics has always been infused with the animal spirits of morality and religion, which when mixed have created a volatile cocktail: an absolutist politics of good and evil in which anxiety is palpable, compromise is elusive, and the metaphors are martial—culture as war. For this sort of politics, nothing tops the presidential elections of 1796 and 1800, when political feuds led to fisticuffs and founding fathers denounced one another as enemies of the state.

Here, just years after the founding, we see the culture wars cycle start to spin. Conservatives in John Adams’s Federalist Party attacked Thomas Jefferson’s religion. Jeffersonians in the Democratic-Republican Party—the liberals in this fight—counterattacked. According to the Constitution, there can be no religious test for the presidency. But can voters impose one? Is the United States a religiously plural nation with a godless Constitution? Or is it a Christian nation under the watchful eye of the Endower of unalienable rights? But the questions in this culture war were not confined to theology (or theocracy). They concerned as well the passing away of a society of white, Protestant, New England men—a hierarchical society rooted in colonial Puritanism, held together by a culture of deference, supported by clerical and business elites, and governed by the wise, the virtuous, and the wealthy. The cultural commitments of this society, in which free citizens turned out to vote on Election Day only to agree to be governed by their betters, included “pride of race, distrust of money-getting men, fears of ‘leveling,’ and suspicion of aliens.”² Preserving these values was the Federalists’ lost cause.

The American Revolution had let loose a torrent of egalitarianism and diversity. The Jeffersonians tapped into that centrifugal force, directing its expansive energies into party politics. The Federalists, defenders of a waning centripetal order (an ancien régime of their own), were determined to hold this torrent back—to stanch rule by “the worthless, the dishonest, the rapacious, the vile, the merciless and the ungodly.”³ Jefferson they saw as a Jacobin from the South, the standard-bearer of a foreign culture of impiety, vice, and guttersnipe party politics.

As they fought over competing visions of their new republic—as they struggled to determine what America was to become—Federalists and Jeffersonians debated not only who should be included in the American family but also who should lead it. Those who cast their ballots in the elections of 1796 and 1800 would not settle these questions for all time, but they would decide that even heretics like Jefferson could be patriots. In fact, they could be president.

Patriot King

DURING THE AMERICAN Revolution, colonists had come together to oppose England’s King George III, whom they accused in their Declaration of Independence of “a long train of abuses . . . scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages.” When that war was over—after Paul Revere had concluded his midnight ride, and the minutemen were done firing on the redcoats at Lexington and Concord, and town criers had read every word of the Declaration aloud, and the ink on the Treaty of Paris had dried, and the tea floating in Boston Harbor had been eaten by fish who were then eaten by free citizens—Americans united under a different man. The general who had crossed the Delaware and endured that horrible winter at Valley Forge was revered as president when representatives of “we the people” gathered in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to craft a Constitution in order to form “a more perfect union.”

This union would never be perfect, of course, and the vexed compromises that attended the drafting of the Constitution—between federal and state power, between a more aristocratic Senate and a more democratic House, between slaveholding and antislavery states, and between proponents and opponents of established religion—by no means buried the differences. In fact, they were the seeds of bitter partisan fruit to come. Nonetheless, in its early years the United States largely lived up to its motto: e pluribus unum (“out of many, one”). And the magician behind that sleight of hand was the Great Unifier, George Washington.

This “Patriot King” won the presidency by acclamation in 1788 and 1792, but long before and after his eight-year reign, he was the father among the founders, a symbol of the unity of the states and the unifying icon of the nation that would come to grace its capital city with his name.⁴ America’s patriarch did more than symbolize national unity, however. He labored to foster moderation and civility in his own cabinet and beyond. Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton—the two great thinkers serving under Washington—were, according to Jefferson, “daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks.”⁵ They fought about such matters as a national bank and the French Revolution, and about the ideas—liberty, equality, republicanism—that were coming to define America. In an August 23, 1792, letter to Jefferson, Washington begged for “charity for the opinions and acts of one another in governmental matters.”⁶ Three days later, in a letter to Hamilton, he pleaded for a “middle course”—for “mutual forbearances and temporising yieldings on all sides.” “Without these,” Washington wrote, “I do not see how the Reins of Government are to be managed, or how the Union of the States can be much longer preserved.”⁷

Washington did manage to hold the union together, but his vision of a politics of civility and moderation, free of “party animosities,”⁸ proved to be quixotic as the nation split for the first time into a political Left (the Jeffersonians) and a political Right (the Federalists). Historians disagree on the temperature of the partisanship that flared up during Washington’s second term, but nearly all resort to metaphors of combustion to describe, as one put it, “the partisan fires that blazed like a raging inferno” through much of the 1790s.⁹

The French Revolution, which saw the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793, stoked that inferno, as partisans of British-loving Federalists, on the one hand, and French-loving Jeffersonians, on the other, worked the bellows from both sides. But domestic crises also roiled the nation. Washington’s decision to meet the antitax resistance movement known as the Whiskey Rebellion with force—he led a militia of nearly thirteen thousand men (larger than the army he commanded in the Revolution) into western Pennsylvania in 1794—and then to denounce the rebels as “incendiaries of public peace and order,”¹⁰ cheered Federalists keen on a strong federal government. But this show of force angered Democratic-Republicans ever wary of centralized military and economic power.

After deciding not to seek a third presidential term, Washington published a farewell address on September 19, 1796. Solemnly warning “against the baneful effects of the spirit of party,” he described the emergent party system as the “worst enemy” of government and factionalism as a sort of hell: a “fire not to be quenched,” in his paraphrase of the Gospel of Mark (9:44-48). Of the spirit of party, he wrote:

It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.

Long before Washington had retired to Mount Vernon, however, efforts to “discourage and restrain” the “mischiefs of the spirit of party” had failed.¹¹ As the refined Deism of the founding period gave way to evangelical enthusiasm, the unquenchable fire of partisan politics burst into flames during the election of 1796, and during the election of 1800 those flames threatened to consume the nation. The political battle between Federalists on the right and Democratic-Republicans on the left turned into a cosmic battle between God and the devil, and America’s first culture war was on.

Election of 1796

IN BOTH OF these pivotal elections—1796 and 1800—the principals were John Adams, who had served as vice president under Washington, and Thomas Jefferson, who had been Washington’s secretary of state. The parties were Adams’s Federalists, who had run the country from the start, and Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, who drew their strength from an odd combination of religious minorities (Baptists and Methodists) and nascent Democratic-Republican societies committed to citizen liberty. The elephant in the room was the French Revolution, which had produced, first, a Reign of Terror that had left tens of thousands dead and, later, a dechristianization campaign that sought to break the chain of memory between the French people and their Roman Catholic past by seizing church lands, forcing priests and nuns to marry, and rechristening the Notre-Dame Cathedral the Temple of Reason. The French Revolution also produced modern Anglo-American conservatism, classically articulated in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). In the United States, events in France alarmed Federalists and inspired a Gothic literature that would resurface in later fights over Catholicism, Mormonism, and slavery. In this case, conservatives prophesied streets of blood, fields of corpses, and guillotined heads if their ordered culture of deference were displaced by the Jeffersonians’ anarchic culture of radical egalitarianism. Jefferson was according to the Federalists the gateway drug to this “terrorism,” and to the unbelief that had made it all possible. According to many Democratic-Republicans, however, it was Adams who was opening the “sluices of terrorism”—by supplanting liberty and democracy with aristocracy and monarchy.¹²

America’s first culture war would eventually extend to a battle on the House floor (instigated by a shot of tobacco spit to the eye) between a Connecticut Federalist brandishing a hickory cane and a Vermont Democratic-Republican wielding fireplace tongs; a deadly pistol duel between a former secretary of the treasury and a sitting vice president; and all manner of rumors, lies, and conspiracy theories. It would be aided and abetted by increased political activity and an expanding public square, which saw the nation’s newspapers swell from under one hundred to well over two hundred during the 1790s.

Virtually all of these newspapers were unapologetically partisan, “delighting and indulging in all manner of abusive, extravagant, witty, hyperbolic, outrageous, obscene, and ad hominem attacks.”¹³ The discourse that energized this expanding public square sounded more like Bill O’Reilly on FOX News in the 2010s than Edward Murrow on CBS in the 1950s. (The Federalist Gazette of the United States called Jeffersonians “the very refuse and filth of society” while the Democratic-Republican Philadelphia Aurora judged Adams “blind, bald, crippled, toothless.”¹⁴) It spread via its own sort of web, which extended in this case to popular pamphlets and not-so-private letters (the blogs of the day), all circulating through close to one thousand post offices (up from only seventy-five at the start of the 1790s).¹⁵ In these media, everyone was spinning for one cause or another. “Public discussions” in this era, Jefferson later observed, “were conducted by the parties with animosity, a bitterness, and an indecency, which had never been exceeded.”¹⁶ Or as Niles’ Weekly Register put it, “They called us ‘jacobins’—we called them ‘tories’—they called us ‘Frenchmen’ and we called them ‘Englishmen’; and, with the use of these repulsive terms, we could not come together, in peace, on any public occasion.”¹⁷

Even Washington came under not-so-friendly fire. “If ever a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation has been debauched by Washington; if ever a nation was deceived by a man, the American nation has been deceived by Washington,” editor Benjamin Franklin Bache wrote in his Aurora shortly before Washington’s retirement.¹⁸ After Washington stepped down, Bache added that “every heart in unison with the freedom and happiness of the people, ought to beat high with exultation that the name of Washington from this day ceases to give a currency to political iniquity, and to legalize corruption.”¹⁹ Such invective earned Bache a beating, both literally and otherwise. Federalist journalist William Cobbett called him “a liar; a fallen wretch; a vessel formed for reprobation” before concluding that “therefore we should always treat him as we would a TURK, a JEW, a JACOBIN or a DOG.”²⁰ Bache was also physically attacked, both in his offices and in the Philadelphia streets. He was later arrested for “libeling the President & the Executive Government, in a manner tending to excite sedition.”²¹ He died of yellow fever while awaiting trial.

The election of 1796, America’s first real presidential race, pitted Adams and Thomas Pinckney of the Federalists against Jefferson and Aaron Burr of the Democratic-Republicans. Adams and Jefferson were once close friends, and as was customary at the time, neither campaigned. Jefferson sequestered himself at his Monticello estate in Virginia; Adams stayed close to home near Boston, Massachusetts. So neither delivered any stump speeches or kissed any babies. Their partisans pulled no punches, however, and thought nothing of hitting below the belt. The future of America was at stake, and the two parties had opposing visions.

Led by Hamilton, who would later find his way onto the ten-dollar bill, the Federalists backed a strong national bank, a strong executive branch, a strong judiciary, and a strong Senate. Though they agreed not to use federal power to support any Protestant denom...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction: The Culture Wars Cycle
• Chapter 1: The Jefferson Wars
• Chapter 2: Anti-Catholicism
• Chapter 3: The Mormon Question
• Chapter 4: Prohibition and Pluralism
• Chapter 5: The Contemporary Culture Wars
• Conclusion: Will the Culture Wars Ever End?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright
• About the Publisher