Over the past week or so, I have received several emails — while noticing similar messages on Twitter — from people asking: “Why is The Atlantic publishing the same story over and over?” Some people ask the same question about The New York Times.
It’s not the same SPECIFIC story over and over, of course. But we are talking about stories with the same basic Big Idea, usually framed in the same way. In other words, it’s kind of a cookie-cutter approach.
The key word is “division,” as in America is getting more and more divided or American evangelicalism is getting more and more divided. A new Ronald Brownstein essay of this kind at The Atlantic — “America’s Blue-Red Divide Is About to Get Starker” — provided the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).
The villains in these dramas are, of course, White evangelicals or, in more nuanced reporting, a radical wing of the White evangelicals. Just this week, I praised the New York Times for running a feature that offered a variation on one of these templates: “Bravo! The New York Times reports that evangelicals are divided, not united on politics.” That piece showed progress, in part, because it undercut the myth of the evangelical political monolith on issues such as Donald Trump, COVID vaccines, QAnon, etc.
Let me make this personal. There is a reason that all of these stories written by journalists and blue-checkmark Twitter stars sound a big familiar to me. You see, people who have been paying attention know that the great “Jesusland” v. the “United States of Canada” divide is actually at least three decades old. It’s getting more obvious, methinks, because of the flamethrower social-media culture that shapes everything,
So let’s take a journey and connect a few themes in this drama, including summary statements by some important scribes. The goal is to collect the dots and the, at the end, we’ll look at how some of these ideas show up in that new leaning-left analysis at The Atlantic.
First, there is the column I wrote in 1998, when marking the 10th anniversary of “On Religion” being syndicated (as opposed to the 33rd anniversary the other day). Here’s the key chunk of that:
… In 1986, a sociologist of religion had an epiphany while serving as a witness in a church-state case in Mobile, Ala. …
"I realized something there in that courtroom. We were witnessing a fundamental realignment in American religious pluralism," said James Davison Hunter of the University of Virginia. "Divisions that were deeply rooted in our civilization were disappearing, divisions that had for generations caused religious animosity, prejudice and even warfare. It was mind- blowing. The ground was moving."
The old dividing lines centered on issues such as the person of Jesus Christ, church tradition and the Protestant Reformation. But these new interfaith coalitions were fighting about something even more basic — the nature of truth and moral authority.
Two years later, Hunter began writing "Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America," in which he declared that America now contains two basic world views, which he called "orthodox" and "progressive." The orthodox believe it's possible to follow transcendent, revealed truths. Progressives disagree and put their trust in personal experience, even if that requires them to "resymbolize historic faiths according to the prevailing assumptions of contemporary life."
That was one view of the growing divide. Here is another, care of the classic “Blue Movie” essay in The Atlantic care of journalist and professor Thomas B. Edsall. In this case, the lens is politics — of course — and battles over, well, you’ll see:
Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.
Respondents who took the "liberal" stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a "conservative" stand on three or more of the questions.
According to Morris and Penn, these questions about religion and morality were better vote predictors than traditional party labels.
Now check out this view of the crisis, seen through some symbolic institutions in food culture — crunched into a Twitter bite.
You see, Americans are fleeing to what they see as safe zones in this great red-blue cultural divide.
This has led to an important new political term in recent elections — “The Big Sort.” This phenomenon has a more political name, as see here:
Political scientist Larry Sabato posted an analysis … that shows how America's "super landslide" counties have grown over time.
Of the nation's total 3,143 counties, the number of super landslide counties — where a presidential candidate won at least 80% of the vote — has jumped from 6% in 2004 to 22% in 2020.
Hang on, we are almost up to 2022!
For 20-plus years, one of my favorite writers on First Amendment issues — even when I disagree with him — has been David French, a Harvard Law man who is now best known for his work as senior editor at The Dispatch, as well as essays in The Atlantic, Time and elsewhere.
In this case, I will be pointing readers to his must-read book “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” Here is a key piece of my column on that:
The book's first lines are sobering, especially after recent [Jan. 6th] scenes on Capitol Hill.
"It's time for Americans to wake up to a fundamental reality: the continued unity of the United States cannot be guaranteed," wrote French. Right now, "there is not a single important cultural, religious, political, or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pulling us apart."
Americans are divided by their choices in news and popular culture. America remains the developing world's most religious nation, yet its increasingly secularized elites occupy one set of zip codes, while most traditional religious believers live in another. In politics, more and more Democrats are Democrats simply because they hate Republicans, and vice versa.
At some point, he added:
… Americans need to regain their trust in Federalism, facing the reality — on many contentious cultural, political and religious issues — that Texas will never be California or that Tennessee will never be New York.
Can Americans tolerate other Americans that they consider intolerant?
In the book, he considers the case of quarterback Colin Kaepernick's decision to kneel during the national anthem, protesting racism and police brutality. Many conservatives should ponder how they would have reacted if "Democratic president Barack Obama had called on the NFL to fire praying football player Tim Tebow because he was 'injecting religion into football'?"
Now, after all of that, look for signs of these images and themes in this thesis statement from the new Brownstein piece, which focuses on the “new” threat of American life after repeal of Roe v. Wade.
Maybe he is actually describing a schism that began in the wake of Roe?
The draft Supreme Court opinion overturning the constitutional right to abortion presents a major setback for reproductive freedom in America and offers a potential jolt to the upcoming midterm elections. But it also illuminates another, deeper phenomenon in American politics: the urgency and ambition of the Republican drive to lock into law the cultural priorities of its preponderantly white, Christian, and older electoral coalition at a moment of rapid demographic change.
In other words, the cultural right has been attacking the left for several decades now, as opposed to the right reacting to a stunning series of wins by progressives. That appears to be the defining lens, here.
But what is the big worry now? What is the specific crisis the fall of Roe would unleash, the new divide that journalists will need to cover? Read carefully:
The fundamental divide in our politics today is between those voters and places most comfortable with the demographic and cultural changes remaking 21st-century America and those most hostile to them—what I’ve called the Democratic “coalition of transformation” and the Republican “coalition of restoration.” A decision overturning Roe v. Wade—especially on the sweeping grounds in Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that was leaked to Politico—would sharpen the confrontation between these two coalitions.
Alito’s draft, if finalized, would place the GOP-appointed Supreme Court majority firmly on a collision course with the priorities and preferences of the racially and culturally diverse younger generations born since 1980, who now constitute a majority of all Americans and who overwhelmingly support abortion rights. It would amplify the already accelerating divergence in the basic civil rights and liberties available to red-state versus blue-state Americans — and not just regarding abortion. It would also solidify the transition toward a political system in which culture, not class, is the principal dividing line between the parties.
The big problem, you see, would be (#WaitForIt) federalism.
In other words, red states would be able to pass laws that — in terms of raw democracy — reflect the views and maybe even the compromises that would be popular with their voters. The same thing would happen in blue states, of course, but that does not appear to be important. It doesn’t pose a threat to the nation’s future.
This is a clash between good culture and bad culture, good believers and bad believers, between an enlightened class and a backwards, even bigoted class.
Would Apple, Disney-ESPN, Facebook, the NCAA, Amazon, The New York Times and other major forces in American life stand for this? Would be result be a kind of economic and technical civil war?
As it turns out, Brownstein also knows that this is not a new story. Hang on for some very blunt language:
Since the 1990s — and especially since the elections of Barack Obama and Trump — Democrats and Republicans have more consistently sorted based on their attitudes about the underlying changes reshaping America. Democrats have assembled a coalition of the voters most comfortable with those changes: young adults, people of color, secular and college-educated white voters, and residents of the largest metropolitan areas. Republicans have consolidated their hold on the voters most uneasy with those changes: older, non-college-educated, non-urban, and religiously devout Christian white voters, especially evangelical Protestants but also culturally conservative Hispanics.
Yes, there is much here to think about it.
No matter what lens you use, it’s hard to ignore the religious, moral and cultural themes in this old, old story that continues to shock many (not all) of the journalists who are in charge of explaining America to America.
Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it along to others.
FIRST IMAGE: Uncredited illustration from a feature entitled “Divided We Fall” at the write brain widow weblog.