The Politics of Cultural Drift (or why do so many Evangelicals support Trump) Part 1: Introduction

My resolve to avoid politics in this blog is weakening.  What I intend to do from now on is to occasionally discuss political issues objectively without taking sides.  This post was sparked by an essay in the Washington Post that I came across recently.  The essay was written by Elizabeth Bruenig who traveled to Texas on Easter weekend 2019 to interview Evangelicals to try to understand why they supported President Trump.  This is a very richly detailed article and the people she talks to cover a wide spectrum of Evangelical opinions.

The most important point to me is the intersection of cultural drift and politics. I have been documenting the facts concerning how cultural drift is associated with changing attitudes toward religion and religious values, but I haven’t discussed the politics of these changes.

Let’s start by understanding the political and cultural divisions that seem to have grown over the last few years. From the outset we should recognize that we are not living in the most contentious period in American history.  That dubious honor belongs to the three decades prior to the American Civil War. Prior to our current difficult time, the most recent period of turmoil was the 1960s, when the confluence of the Civil Rights struggle, the Vietnam War and the generational battle between Hippies and the Silent Majority led to campus takeovers, bombings, murder, riots, demonstrations, police brutality, the National Guard shooting students, and a strong feeling by many that the country was falling apart. Our current season of anger and division has not yet reached that level of discontent and fear (believe me, I was there), but has several very dangerous elements.

The most striking difference between the era of Trump and the era of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon has been the development over the last forty years of two distinct and non-overlapping political parties.

In the 60s the Democrats included both Northern (and often Southern) liberals and “boll weevils” –Democrats who favored fiscal conservatism, an assertive foreign policy and social welfare programs. Many of these “boll weevils” were also segregationists. The Republican Party also included liberal and conservative wings, as exemplified by Nelson Rockefeller on the one hand and Barry Goldwater on the other.  Thus, when Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act came up for a vote in the House, 152 Democrats and 138 Republicans voted for it, while 96 Democrats and 34 Republicans voted against it.  Johnson got a greater level of support from Republicans than he did from Democrats.

In the fifty plus years since the Civil Rights Ace, conservatives in the Democratic party and liberals in the Republican Party have disappeared. In fact, “moderates” in both parties are an endangered species. Moreover, the issues that divided us even twenty years ago are no longer at the center of our political discourse. Republicans are no longer the party of free trade, a muscular foreign policy and fiscal conservatism (although they continue to believe in cutting taxes).  Democrats are trying to be the party of realism in foreign affairs and of expanding the federal government’s role in health and education. More importantly, they are the party of fighting climate change and racism. They are also the party of “identity,” fighting for minority rights and acceptance across a wide variety of fronts.

But today’s struggle is not about fiscal deficits, neocon foreign policy, or even the size of government; even less can it be described as a conflict between traditional conservative views being opposed to traditional liberal views. Rather it can be best described as a “culture war.” In broad strokes, one side views the increasing secularization of American society, marked by a commitment to abortion rights, gay rights and gender equality as both inevitable and desirable, while the other side is attempting to push back against these hallmarks of cultural drift.  These specific issues are only surface reflections of a deeper chasm –that between coastal, urban, college-educated, secular populations (the modernists) and more rural, more Southern and mid-Western, more religious and less educated populations (the traditionalists).  By and large, Evangelical Christians are an important part of the traditionalist group.

The idea of a “culture war” was first broached by James Davison Hunter in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America. “The heart of the culture war argument,” Hunter writes, “was that American public culture was undergoing a realignment that, in turn, was generating significant tension and conflict. These antagonisms were playing out not just on the surface of social life (that is, in its cultural politics) but at the deepest and most profound levels. … Thus underneath the myriad political controversies over so-called cultural issues, there were yet deeper crises over the very meaning and purpose of the core institutions of American civilization.”  At the 1992 Republican Convention, Pat Buchanan described the 1992 election as “about what we believe, and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”

In 2019 the modernists seem to be gaining. On all the fronts of the culture war, the sentiment in favor of feminism, a more permissive view toward sex, homosexuality and abortion rights are gaining cultural, if not political traction. In a 2014 Pew research Center survey, 33% of Americans believed that there was no absolute standard of right and wrong, while 64% believed in “situational ethics.” Thus, it is not surprising that 68% of Americans say that homosexuals should be allowed to marry (compared to 12% in 1988).  In another poll 71% of Americans found sex outside of marriage to be moral; 77% believed divorce was moral; 64% believed having a baby outside marriage was moral; and 42% believed that abortion was moral. 

According to Bruenig, the grievances of the traditionalists and Evangelicals has been magnified by three issues: 1) the recent increase in economic insecurity; 2) the continuous influx of non-European immigrants and the consequent feeling or “replacement,” a critical white nationalist trope, and 3) the disdain of the modernist towards the “deplorables” who make up such a large part of the traditionalist base.  We will discuss each of these in turn in future posts.

The next post will examine the economic insecurity that is affecting white working class males.