A few days ago I wrote about the scuffle at Liberty College over its refusal to sanction a Democratic Club. That story came from Inside Higher Education which did a follow-up in yesterday’s edition. It covered a couple of cases of the inverse, where a Democratic student group exists on a conservative Christian campus without too much rancor, and a Republican student organization was established in a liberal college, with none of the expected backlash.
These schools, Regent University and Hampshire College, are hardly representative of private liberal arts schools in the nation. And you can’t make an argument for a trend with just two cases. Still, these stories make one wonder whether or not we really have been experiencing a “culture war,” or whether we have witnessed a number of culture battles, each of which involved different sets of protagonists, and none which are truly national except for abortion and gay rights.
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life sponsored a discussion of this question a few years ago—a fascinating conversation between James Davison Hunter and Alan Wolfe (since then it has been published as a book).
Hunter’s position is that culture is more than a set of values that can be identified by survey research (e.g., this percentage is against abortion, that percentage supports the right to it). Culture is not just a set of beliefs, but includes institutions and elites that produce, shape, or maintain those beliefs. Hunter would have us look at the elites who have the disproportionate power to frame cultural debates. So, even if polls show that the bulk of Americans sit in the pragmatic, ‘live and let live’ middle, they are still affected by the war between the pundits, intellectuals, academics, and politicians who stand on the opposite side of the big questions about what is right and wrong, ugly or beautiful, relative or universal.
Wolfe argues that culture is more ephemeral than Hunter supposes. Culture (a people’s language, customs, symbols, and norms, including the ways people pass them on to the next generation) is not the bedrock underlying all the rest of the aspects of our lives. Culture does not determine politics, economics, and so on, but rather more the opposite. One piece of evidence he gives to support this was the Southern Baptist Convention’s initial endorsement of Roe v. Wade, which it retracted 10 years later. If culture runs so deep, why the flip flop? I suppose Wolfe could today point also to the 2006 and 2008 elections, where the permanent Republican majority that Rove was supposedly building on the back of “values voters” suddenly faded away.
I suppose Wolfe would point to the Regent and Hampshire as more evidence that the Culture War is really just a lot of angry noise that comes and goes. Hunter might see them as evidence too—or the media reaction to them as evidence. Why would Inside Higher Education decide they were newsworthy unless there weren’t some significant struggle over the relationship between religion and partisanship?
I guess we could also say that even if Wolfe’s right, and we’re not really in the middle of a culture war, we have an argument over whether there is indeed such a war, which takes us back to Hunter.
My easy way out of this, borrowing from Wolfe, is that there is a middle way. Culture neither determines the rest of social life, nor is it simply a product of it. Culture exists in layers that criss-cross the rest of the facets of life, shaping them, and being shaped by them. A complex set of interactive relationships.
Let me explain this in my next entry. I’ve been grading AP exams the past few days, and my mind’s a bit frazzled.
