Culture Wars: Alan Wolfe

In his response, Alan Wolfe says that Hunter doesn't give as much attention as he ought to surveys, to how ordinary people think about the world and their culture. In his book "One Nation, After All," Wolfe argued that the culture war was a conflict among elites that didn't have nearly as much to do with daily life as normal people live it. The conflict between traditionalists and modernist libertarians posited by culture warriors is really something within each American, not just a Red State vs. Blue State phenomenon.

Cultural values are not fixed. For example, when Roe v. Wade came down in 1973, the Southern Baptist Convention endorsed the decision. Why? For one, they knew that Catholics were opposed to abortion, and in those days, there was a knee-jerk reaction against Catholic attitudes. For another, the Baptists have always had a very strong sense of the importance of separating church and state. These views lined them up behind the Roe decision. Ten years later, they repudiated their support.

"If this notion of the right to life is so culturally embedded, if it's supposed to have such deep religious roots, if it's supposed to be one of these timeless things ... how can it possibly change so radically?" Wolfe asks. He says the answer is that politics came to matter more to the Southern Baptists than religion: that how you responded to a decision of SCOTUS defined a Southern Baptist's theological views, not the other way around.

It was a huge step for conservative Protestantism in the United States, he says, to become more theocratic. Wolfe predicts a return among conservative Protestants to its historic stance of withdrawal, or at least skepticism, of politics. Conservative Protestants will be rethinking how their religiosity has been corrupted by identifying too closely with politics.

Wolfe says the most important insight from Hunter's work is that in recent times, conservatives within each religious tradition (Catholics, Protestants, Jews) found they had more in common with each other than within liberals of their own traditions. "All you have to do now is look at the Episcopal Church to see that," Wolfe said. But Wolfe says he doesn't think this situation will hold; he predicts a return to traditional religious divisions -- that Catholics in general will be more hostile to Protestants, and so forth.

Wolfe contends that at the elite level, conservative Catholics and Protestants are actually beginning to move farther apart. Look at the Supreme Court: conservative presidents have reached to Catholic legal intellectuals to sit on the Supreme Court. Richard John Neuhaus is a key figure here; in Wolfe's view, Neuhaus sees his role as to galvanize the Catholic intellectual resources to provide the intellectual heavy lifting that Evangelicals can't provide. Evangelicals, says Wolfe, have long been insecure about their intellectual accomplishments. Wolfe sees some tensions emerging on that point.

Conservative Protestants have been best friends with the state of Israel for a generation or so, but Jewish leaders are warning that their friendship is deceptive -- that there's no difference between Christian philosemitism and antisemitism. Evangelicals really want to convert them, the idea goes. Abe Foxman of the ADL came to Boston College to speak on this theme, recently, and (says Wolfe) the Jews in the audience were unpersuaded -- not because they have much trust in Christian intentions, but because they see Muslims as so much more of a threat to Jews that they see it as foolish to worry about Evangelicals.

Finally, Wolfe says that if religions are re-emerging with a sense of mistrust among one another, there is a growing appreciation for particular religious sensibilities within the broader churches. He says that on Boston College's campus, there's a strong and distinct Catholic sensibility whether or not the Catholic students count themselves as liberal or conservative. For example, the most conservative Catholics are always going to be queasy about the kind of economic policies that conservative Evangelicals embrace with no problem. And Catholics, no matter how liberal, are always going to have difficulty accepting abortion without restrictions, as liberal secularists do.