The Alphabet of Us (Culture)
Culture
Isn’t it astounding how benign the word “culture” is when you look it up in the dictionary? One definition describes the collection of art and its expression, and the other simply states that groups of people developed stylistic methods of expression based on proximity.
Culture: 1. (n) the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively
2. (n) the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group
In America, however, one segment within the melting pot of diversity has chosen domination over all other segments. Rich, white men seized the power and to this day fight against losing it.
Nevertheless, the Declaration of Independence was written, and despite the obvious hypocrisy of the status of the forefathers, subjection and slavery was established as the opposite of America’s primary directive:
That the Constitution proceeds to disinclude all people except white males does not escape notice, and even today this absence is being utilized — as it has always been in America since white people stepped off the boat— to justify the elimination of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness.”
The history of America is the story of the struggle to provide these liberties to all people. There have been ups and downs, of course, but we seem to be experiencing a new low — we, the people, have decided that the truth doesn’t matter anymore. Turning away from facts and choosing to deny the truth if the denial will maintain power is part and parcel of the right wing of the culture wars.
But the buy-in on the part of the American people seems different.
For instance, the Evangelicals would have us believe they’ve always been in lock step against Roe v. Wade, and I was recently astonished to learn that the Southern Baptist Convention did not initially oppose Roe:
When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, the Southern Baptist Convention’s former president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas — also one of the most famous fundamentalists of the 20th century — was pleased: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” he said, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”
This Baptists were persuaded to change this reasonable approach.
What, then, was the real origin of the religious right? It turns out that the movement can trace its political roots back to a court ruling, but not Roe v. Wade. It was actually Green v. Connelly, in which racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable educational institutions.
In the early 1970’s, Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, seized upon the fury of the white evangelical church over IRS investigations of “segregation academies,” as they were characterized. Jerry Falwell was particularly outspoken, as his Lynchburg Christian School was being investigated. He was furious. “In some states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor than a Christian school.”
This dates the marriage between right-wing politics and Evangelical religion. A decision was made by Weyrich and Falwell to blame Democratic President Jimmy Carter for the IRS actions against segregated schools, even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and South Carolina’s Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell and Weyrich were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.
But Falwell and Weyrich were also savvy enough to recognize that organizing grassroots evangelicals to defend racial discrimination would be difficult.
In 1978, however, an issue fell into their laps — and this subject became the foundation stone that culture wars could be built upon.
The 1978 election saw an influx of evangelical voters. Pro-life activists leafleted parking lots, and a wave of anti-Roe politicians were ushered into Congress. Afterwards, correspondence between Weyrich and evangelical leaders fairly crackles with excitement. In a letter to fellow conservative Daniel B. Hales, Weyrich characterized the triumph of pro-life candidates as “true cause for celebration,” and Robert Billings, a cobelligerent, predicted that opposition to abortion would “pull together many of our ‘fringe’ Christian friends.”
Roe v. Wade had been law for more than five years.
Weyrich enlisted an unlikely ally in the quest to advance abortion as a political issue: Francis A. Schaeffer — a goateed theologian who warned about the dangers of “secular humanism.” Schaeffer was not known for his political activism, but by the late 1970s he decided that legalized abortion would lead to infanticide, and he was eager to sound the alarm. He did so by teaming with a pediatric surgeon, C. Everett Koop, to produce a series of films entitled Whatever Happened to the Human Race? In the early months of 1979, Schaeffer and Koop toured the country with these films, which depicted the scourge of abortion in graphic terms — most memorably with a scene of plastic baby dolls strewn along the shores of the Dead Sea.
Jimmy Carter lost the 1980 election for many reasons, but the religious right claimed responsibility. “I knew that we would have some impact on the national elections,” Falwell said, “but I had no idea that it would be this great.”
Although abortion emerged as a rallying cry by 1980, the real roots of the religious right lay not in the defense of a fetus but in the defense of racial segregation.
The NRA Joins In
The constituency of the silent majority is much the same in 2022 as it was in 1980. The decades have worked to polish the propaganda machines, as new organizations joined forces with evangelicals to add hefty slogans — notably the now-bankrupt and embattled National Rifle Association (N. R. A.)
In his 2020 tell-all book entitled Inside the NRA, Joshua Powell, former lieutenant of NRA President Wayne LaPierre, reveals some of the sloganeering and the decision to abstain from taking on any responsibility for the Sandy Hook shootings.
In 2018, the NRA annual convention was held in Dallas, only a few months after the Sandy Hook shootings. La Pierre appeared onstage grinning and waving, and the convention was headlined by none other than Donald Trump.
Powell reveals in an interview with National Public Radio that after the organization ramped up its rhetoric post-Sandy Hook, they added a million new members. Some of them were Oath Keepers.
In 1991, James Davison Hunter wrote a book called The Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America. he hoped that exposure would lead to openness, and ultimately, understanding and change. In a 2021 interview, he instead confesses that he thinks the condition is worse.
He goes on to point out that a thirty-year culture war preceeded the Civil War, but the true war was never won. “My view is that the reason why we’re continuing to see this press toward racial reckoning is because it’s never been addressed culturally.”
The United States should NEVER have been just white.
- We started this country out by segregating the Native Americans because we wanted their land.
- We had some strange, abiding belief that black people picked cotton more easily than our white children.
- And when it wasn’t skin color it was nationality and when it wasn’t nationality it was religion and when it wasn’t religion, it was gender and when it wasn’t gender, it was sexual orientation, and when it wasn’t sexual orientation, it has come down to assessing people based on if they believe the lie that the election was stolen.
Something has to come along and stop this — or God is going to sneeze and just blow us all away.
To do what James Davison Hunter suggests about addressing equality culturally, may I suggest something simple? Something you can perform within your own three square feet?
Turn culture wars into culture joys.
There may be cultural ignorance, but let’s try to transform our ignorance into the joy of discovering brothers and sisters within the human race.
Here are the steps that will guide us:
1. We share so much in common that it will be fun to explore our differences. It’s not the other way around — it’s not that we’re so different that we need to explore our commonalities. I have been with people of every culture, and the basic need for humor, heart, soul, thinking and nourishment is present within each.
2. No one is better than anyone else, which means no one is worse than anyone else.
3. No teachers. All students. One of the more ridiculous aspects of culture wars is the notion that certain races of people have been given an advantage in arenas of life, and for that purpose they’ve been placed in the world to teach. We’re all students.
4. And finally, understanding is something that people need to give to us–never anything we can demand. I don’t know what the answer is to immigration, but I do know two things: (a) you can’t stop it; and (b) since you can’t stop it, find a way to make it valuable. You can either look at the immigration question and say, “We need to close our borders,” or you can say, “Since our borders are open, how can we channel this energy to make America more productive?”
Start by understanding that the culture wars are just a lot of people pushing and shoving to prove they’re supreme over one another.
We all know our survival depends on stopping the war — because truly, you can try to fight against nature, but Mother Nature always has a way of spanking her unruly children.
