Our secularist democratic party

Public Interest, Fall, 2002 by Louis Bolce, Gerald De Maio

In early August 2000, when Al Gore selected Joe Lieberman as his running mate, the Times and other major newspapers and magazines published a flurry of stories about fears expressed by Democrats (typified by then Democratic National Chairman Ed Rendell) that the Lieberman nomination might stir up latent anti-Semitism and lead to negative voting against the party's presidential candidate by retrograde southern evangelicals. As it turned out, these apprehensions were unwarranted. Lieberman's Jewish identity was a nonissue. ANES thermometer data offer strong empirical evidence about why Lieberman's religious affiliation didn't hurt Core in the election, particularly among evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. The average rating white Christian fundamentalists gave to Jews was a warm 66 degrees, a finding consistent with ANES surveys reaching back over a decade. It was no different from the mean ratings that Catholics and mainline Protestants gave to Jews. Among respondents who could correctly identify both Lieberman's and Gore's religious affiliation, Christian fundamentalists felt significantly warmer toward Lieberman (56 degrees) than toward Gore, a Southern Baptist (42 degrees). Disapproval of Lieberman came not from Christian fundamentalists but from secularists, who complained that his public professions of faith and piety blurred the line between religion and politics, and from cultural conservatives who suspected that Lieberman's post-convention stances on issues like partial-birth abortion and school vouchers were more in tune with the secularist tilt of the Democratic party than with his pre-convention positions, thought to be anchored in his religious orthodoxy.

By focusing on supposed denominational conflicts that had in fact diminished, the Times's coverage of the 2000 election overlooked the more significant religious divide in the electorate-that between the religious and nonbelievers. And by concentrating on the threat of politicized evangelicism, the Times ignored secularists' increased importance to the Democratic coalition and agenda since the 1970s, and their pivotal role in fomenting the culture wars and spurring the religious realignment of the electorate.

The origins of the culture wars

The "culture wars" is the controversial metaphor used to describe the restructuring of religious and cultural conflict in the United States since the 1960s. The thesis is most closely associated with sociologist James Davison Hunter, whose 1991 book The Culture Wars posited that "the dominant impulse at the present time is toward the polarization of a religiously informed public culture into distinct moral and religious camps." Hunter called these camps "orthodox" and "progressivist." On the orthodox side are persons who locate moral authority in a transcendent source, such as God or the Bible. Orthodox morality, according to Hunter, adheres to an absolute standard of right and wrong and is based on universalistic principles. Progressivists, in contrast, embrace a humanistic ethic drawn from reason, science, and personal experience. Progressivist moral rules are "loose-bounded," pluralistic, and relative to circumstance. This new cleavage cuts across the major American faith traditions and most denominations .