Empire means never having to say you're sorry

The debate over the treatment of detainees will now bump up another notch in fury. US Attorney General Eric Holder has announced the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate allegations that CIA personnel and contractors abused detainees in a variety of ways not covered by law, not even by the infamous Justice Department torture memos that delineated in painstaking detail what could be done to detainees--from placing the detainee in a confinement box together with an insect to waterboarding (some of these memos can be found here; and for a summary of the "litany of C.I.A. tactics," see the NY Times article here).

Republicans predictably oppose this investigation--for a variety of reasons. There's the hyperbolic claim that the administration is walking the fine line between incompetence and treason, with all our lives at stake. According to the Drudge Report, House Republican Peter King exclaimed:

"It’s bulls***. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on," he said of the attorney general's move, which he described as a "declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense."

And

"They’ve declared war on the CIA. We should resist and fight back as hard as we can," he said. "It should be a scorched earth policy. ... This isn't just another policy. This goes to the heart of our national defense. We should do whatever we have to do."

A calmer Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, says it will distract from "the CIA's current counterinsurgency efforts." Or, according to nine Republican Senators in a letter to Attorney General Holder, such an investigation would "chill intelligence activities" and subject it to the "political winds" of the day. One of these nine, Kit Bond, considered the investigation a presidential "power grab" according to a CBS source, a bizarre attack on one of administration's own senior appointees, CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Senator Bond's complaint is curious. Evidently he and others can't understand an administration which doesn't staff its intelligence and justice agencies with abject loyalists. Bond also seems to forget all the power the Bush-Cheney administration grabbed in the realms of domestic and foreign security.

The nine GOP Senators are correct in seeing the "political winds" at work in intelligence activities--but that's what elections are about in democracy. They are supposed to lead to substantive changes in policy, even foreign policy, if that's indeed what electoral winners had promised in their campaigns. The GOP lost big-time in '06 and '08. Now some of its members think it's somehow wrong that their minority status means they don't get to dictate policy? And do these particular Republicans really want more European style foreign and intelligence services well-insulated from the public eye, from partisan influence?

As for the contention that this investigation will hamper counterinsurgency efforts--well, that is a stronger claim, but one that rests on contested evidence that torture and all the other extra-legal tactics do mean increased security for the US. It also ignores evidence that there are other effective methods of getting information, not to mention alternatives to a "scorched earth" policy in protecting the US. Nor do the defenders of torture seem to contemplate its costs, such as the diminished standing of the US in world opinion (what some call "soft power"), blowback, the risk to our captured soldiers, as well as the viral creep of organizational practices--if we can do this, maybe we can do that. . . .People, and nations, don't go to hell in one fell swoop, they go there step by step.

The problem is that we have a prosperous democracy, but we are also an empire. That is, we are a state (a country or national government in the US lexicon) that has increased its relative power and wealth in part by subordinating peoples outside our territorial borders. And subordination inevitably means resistance, and ergo violence. As Max Weber tells us, all states depend on monopolizing the legitimate means of violence (though some are more successful than others). Empires are states that dominate people outside their borders because of their preponderant power--rarely a monopoly, though, and even more rarely, legitimate.

But not for want of trying. In his excellent book, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors, Charles Maier notes the importance to imperialists of constructing a rationale for their rule or dominance, whether direct or indirect. The recurring resistance and violence on imperial frontiers require some sort of logic beyond naked national self-interest to convince people at home that empire is worth the cost, and convince subjects in the frontier that empire is really better for them than complete sovereignty (so stop fighting us!). This rationale is usually very principled. Empire brings the peace (Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana). Empire brings modernity. Empire brings democracy. "Imperial ideology," Maier says, "must always be an exercise in lofty denial" (Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 61). Especially in a liberal democracy, we could add.

Liberal imperialists will always deplore killing and beating, imprisoning and humiliating civilians, burning their homes, and torturing suspects as aberrant and counterproductive. But if empire is to be maintained, the soldiers assigned the dirty work know that it is sometimes necessary even at the price of their later disavowal and disgrace. Ultimately a mix of secrecy or "deniability" must be developed if leaders are not prepared to renounce the imperial project. Hypocrisy is the tribute imperialism pays to democracy (p. 64).

We get whiffs of that hypocrisy in the jargon we use for torture, such as the phrase "refined interrogation techniques,' or in the legal hair-splitting in the torture memos that makes waterboarding okay but fracturing a cranium perhaps not.

But not all our leaders have been liberals, of course, nor are they worried about apologies. Hence the argument that whatever you call torture, it works, even if morally dubious. Former Vice-President Cheney is of course convinced that it does, like he's convinced that all of his decisions were necessary in pushing the country to invade Iraq, and in centralizing authority within the Executive, particularly his office--though he criticizes the Obama administration for doing so:

. . .President Obama’s decision to allow the Justice Department to investigate and possibly prosecute CIA personnel, and his decision to remove authority for interrogation from the CIA to the White House, serves as a reminder, if any were needed, of why so many Americans have doubts about this Administration’s ability to be responsible for our nation’s security.

Along with this bit of hypocrisy, there's another in that Cheney has rested his reputation on an ends-justifies-the-means sort of argument that one would think is inimical to the party of "family values." Together with these situational ethics, there's the familar drumbeat of fear that worked so well for the Bush-Cheney-Rove team until the 2006 elections. "They" will get us unless we resort to brutal methods that contradict domestic and international law, as well as belie our principles.

And the way we can reconcile these contradictions, counteract these hypocrisies, is to hold on to the assertion that what we do in the world is right, because the United States can do nothing but. Go to Townhall.com and you'll see a cute blonde woman selling T-shirts with the logo "I'd rather be waterboarding." What a brave, bold statement! And clearly no embarrassment about selling a thing by mixing sex and violence. That's the attitude needed to get us over all this hand-wringing over nasty things we've done to terrorists, well, suspected terrorists usually, but who cares when 24 Hours TV scenarios are unfolding about us, or even within our borders. In our case, Might is Right, and there's no need to say we're sorry.

Well, I've descended into sarcasm now, a big weakness of mine when I'm upset. I should temper all this that I don't buy the notion that everything the US has done in the world, even as empire, is evil. It's intellectually lazy to turn to this sort Manichean dualism. It's the kind of thing a cynical leader does trying to stir up the crowd. It's the narrative the Bush administration employed, as has Al Qaeda.

I love my country, places (the Oregon coast, the White Mountains, the New York Public Library), people (my family and friends, of course, but also the icons like Madison, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King), and things like NPR, or Scorcese and Coen Brothers films, or the Lutheran church I grew up in, or its tremendous diversity and pluralism, and I'm grateful that the US government created programs such as the Peace Corps and Fulbright fellowships (not to mention Pell Grants) that gave me opportunities to experience a much larger world than the one in which I was born. The US to me is like that person we've all known who is lovable and loving, who is inspirational, with remarkable accomplishments, and who turns out to have some pretty horrific character flaws.

Nor do I romanticize those who resist our empire on its frontiers. I'm no fan of those among the Islamic fundamentalists who yearn for our destruction, who desire to spread regimes inimical to pluralism, who resort to indiscriminate violence to achieve their ends.

Yet I criticize. I criticize because I think we can do better than this. Not because of some crude Calvinistic notion that our great power and wealth prove we know how to do what's best for the world. Not because of some rosy-eyed vision of the past that makes history equal progress. It is this little kernel of hope--we can do better--that has been behind what we now look back on as a good change--expanding suffrage beyond property owners, ending slavery, extending (if not always enforcing) equal political rights to blacks, women, and other marginalized people, signing on to international human rights accords, and so on. These momentous changes also required a great deal of struggle, some of it dramatic, much of it the daily nitty-gritty that comes with organizing collective action. But the hope of doing better mattered throughout.

Wouldn't it be something if the President called on Americans to dedicate their energies to coming up with new ways of life that didn't depend on extending and defending the picket lines of empire? Could we give up on empire without being forced to by defeat, or overreach, or implosion--as has been the fate of past ones? Could we infuse our political system, and our foreign relations, with the axiom that Might inevitably subverts Right, and act with due caution when it comes to the use of violence?

Yep, I'm that oxymoron--a hopeless idealist.

Gatesgate

I recently talked with my friend, Lori, about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the black Harvard professor, the arrest that President Obama in his prime time press conference called stupid, followed later by a kind of an apology to the Cambridge police and the arresting officer. Obama said he could have "calibrated" his words better, a calibration that I'm sure has his critics hooting.

Anyway, she said that we shouldn't waste our time talking about the incident, and I said I disagreed. I said, not fully believing myself, that it might lead to some useful conversation about race and class. With her permission, here's her email response (with some minor editing):

Ok, here's a real response to Gatesgate (it's only a matter of time, right?).

First, everyone who knows or knows of Skip Gates has said, "serves him right." This guy is typical of BigHouse Academics--coasting on a reputation and the work of grad students. He hasn't had an original thought since the late 20th century and is besotted by his own celebrity. His documentary about Africa was atrocious (reportedly, for I saw only a few minutes.) His public personae is unctuous and unworthy of scholarly attention. Oprah's DNA. Please.

But those are the rewards of life in America--if you become a celebrity in anything you get to leave all the mundane stuff behind. You don't have to teach, really (just come in and "profess"); you go on TV, you become Famous. So most of us are just thinking, "Good. You probably deserve a little jail time, you f______ twit."

But there's a real issue here which is, why do the police feel free to arrest, harass or otherwise not give the benefit of the doubt to someone who is black and male and standing on his own front lawn. If he were drunk, fine. If he had pulled a gun or brandished a weapon, there's a case. But he was YELLING. He called the cop a racist and, after a few weeks in China (where he was, ostensibly, doing some other

celebrity documentary on a subject not of his own expertise) and a long flight he was probably more than a bit cranky. A white guy in the same predicament (a white upper class guy--there aren't any poor white people living in Cambridge) would have been cut a much larger slice of slack. They would have patted him on the head and sent him inside. But to ARREST the guy? Preposterous. And Obamarama was right the first time--STUPID! Do NOT arrest celebrity intellectuals who have a platform over which you have no control. Now we will have the specter of Gates proclaiming his solidarity with all the brothas who are doing time. Now he will have street cred because he spent, what, an hour in the Cambridge lock up. Oh, boy. Is your sphincter twitching? Did you become someone's bitch, Dr. Gates? How horrible for you.

What I dislike most about this is that Black people like Gates (and me--I do not disavow my own privilege) exist between the scylla of race and the Charybdis of class. Not dammed if we do or don't, but rather--what's at work here? Clearly, as the "phantom negro" pointed out [found here], Gates forgot where he was from He's lived most of his life within the protective shell of academic privilege. That doesn't mean he doesn't get funny looks in the grocery store. My father was a well-paid, well-known surgeon for his entire life in Indianapolis but it didn't stop clerks from not wanting to cash his checks or making sure that what he was buying was EXPENSIVE. (He was once buying pistachio nuts for my mother - a pound I think. The girl at the counter said, 'you know those are $3.00 a pound" or whatever they were. And he said, 'Yep. I'll take two." Better to have a sense of humor about this sh__.) Anyway, Gates always wants to seem as if he is "down" as if he is just that poor black kid from West Virginia. But he's not anymore. He hasn't been that for a long time. He has come to expect to be treated with a certain deference that comes with academic status. I think about this all the time--I'm walking up the stairs and a horde of clueless cellphone-humping 18 year olds are standing between me and my job and I think "can I have a little deference here? Anyone? I'm the f______ teacher, you sh__heads. Get out of my way." But, alas, no. The waters do not part. They treat me like the help I am. SO be it.

So, it's complicated. Skip Gates is an asshole and some of us are glad he was publicly humiliated. But his being an asshole doesn't mean he deserves to be treated like a criminal on his lawn. Will this do anything to advance the conversation about "race"? No, because Americans do not WANT to have a conversation about race. Americans do not want to think intelligently about class and discrimination and respect and privilege. The fact that the guy who arrested him was their diversity trainer says a lot. Here is a man who can't see far enough into the near future to think "hmmm... maybe I shouldn't arrest Professor Gates because it might look as if I'm harassing a well-respected Black man and that might echo centuries of racial oppression. Maybe I'll just walk away." THIS is the guy who trains OTHER cops about racial profiling. Good.

At least more folks around the world like us now. . .

In my last post, I groused about President Obama's continuation of imperial ambitions.  I suppose an anti-imperialist position in the heartland of empire is hopelessly idealistic, or foolish (though there are pragmatic considerations related to the costs of managing empire, and of what Chalmers Johnson calls "blowback").  I suppose I should also recognize that anyone moving into the US executive necessarily takes the reins of empire, and I can't expect him (or her in the future) to drop them and let the horses run where they will.

And clearly Obama's no Bush, thank god.  He showed that last night in the press conference, where he was, as always, articulate and thoughtful, and clearly, he's just plain smart--it's a relief that many Americans appreciated such characteristics enough that they would put him into the presidency, and that the yahoos in this country who equate anti-intellectualism with virtue don't always win the day.

Obama's character, and his foreign policy endeavors, are apparently producing positive consequences abroad, according to a recent Pew study (found here).  In brief:

The image of the United States has improved markedly in most parts of the world, reflecting global confidence in Barack Obama. In many countries opinions of the United States are now about as positive as they were at the beginning of the decade before George W. Bush took office.

I still am heartily opposed to our ongoing efforts to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into stable, manageable outposts of US empire, especially in the name of democratization.  But I shouldn't evaluate the Obama administration on that one policy alone.

Innocent Americans

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  That's basically Andrew Bacevich's message in his new essay in the recent edition of World Affairs (you can find an interview and a link to the essay here).  It's something William Appleman Williams--one of my professors at Oregon State, and a source for Bacevich's writings--argued 30 years ago.  "Empire as a way of life," was Williams' term for the US worldview in which Americans act like an empire, deny they are an empire, refuse to acknowledge the sins of empire, and foist the costs of empire onto the backs of their soldiers and their families, as well as peoples in other lands that we, with our innocent good intentions, are determined to save from themselves.

Bacevich's essay is a review of Graham Greene's marvelous book, The Quiet American. Published in 1955, it was one of the earliest accurate gauges of the style and consequences US involvement in Vietnam.  We apparently learned little from that bloody fiasco now memorialized on a simple, somber wall with the names of 58,195 dead.  I remember hearing some NSA analyst at a 2003 International Studies conference--as Bush pushed our country willy-nilly to war, with many Americans marching in lockstep--blithely arguing that we needed to win the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqis.  My god, I thought, what's next? Strategic hamlets?  In The Quiet American  Greene says "Innocence is a kind of insanity."  It can also be a kind of stupidity.

Bacevich argues that

Those who conceived the Iraq War, the cheerleaders who promoted it from the sidelines, and critics of that war who have now succeeded to positions of power share a common interest in wiping the slate clean, refurbishing the claim that the United States meant well because the United States always means well. No doubt mistakes were made.  Yet America's benign intentions expiate sins committed along the way--or allow those in authority to assign responsibility for any sins to soldiers who in doing Washington's bidding became sources of embarrassment.

It's not only expiation we seek.  We deny the costs of our imperial sins.  Guantánamo is a good example. President Obama made a campaign promise to shut down the prison there, a place chock-full of victims of the notion that good intentions trump egregious violations of our Constitution and international human rights law.  Yet he can't.  Americans and their state governments all refuse to have the prisoners resettled on their presumably innocent turf.  Congress has cut off funding for the closure (see story here).  All those Americans who backed the Bush Administration's war and other 'global war on terror' actions now don't want to pay for the consequences of those policies.  I guess that's the privilege of empire.

But it's not like President Obama is innocent of innocence.  As Bacevich suggests, the President's Afganistan-Pakistan gambit is evidence that his administration has learned little from the past, for all his allusions to Lincoln, FDR, and Kennedy.  While the tone and style differ dramatically from those of Bush, Obama shares Bush's fervor, or perhaps fever.  We can do this thing in Afghanistan, as if he's stumbled on to the magic warring-while-nation-building formula that no previous administration has ever been able to produce.  I guess that's another privilege of empire--the ability to say without a qualm that, this time, we'll get it right, we can "destroy a village in order to save it."

Culture War or Culture Scuffles?

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.

Christian Crusader

To my mind, the war and occupation of Iraq were like the first steps in a very long division problem. The first few calculations were wrong (mistaken or massaged intelligence, undermanned and undersupported troops, corrupt occupational government, Abu Graib, etc.), but the solver couldn’t go back and erase them, and start over. He or she just had to just keep plugging on, and no matter if all the rest of the calculations were correct, the answer will still be wrong.

But some, who may even acknowledge mistakes in execution, would still see the war and occupation as good works. Those Bible verses on the covers of DOD intelligence briefings suggested as much (discussed in my first posting), and I have wondered how widespread is the notion that the War on Terror (though the Obama administration no longer calls it that) is a Christian holy war. So I went swimming through the web and came across an interview with David French in Citizenlink.org, a part of Dr. Dobson’s Focus on the Family. David French blogs for the National Review on academic issues (Phi Beta Cons) and is senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal group that takes on threats to Christian privileges in the public square.

The Citizenlink interview’s angle was French’s decision to resume active duty in the Army Reserves, and he served for a year in Iraq. But French’s explanation of the military’s role is what interested me—a frank statement of Christian crusade.

First, there is the common dumbing down of the enemy, a demonization, and a grandiose depiction of their threat.

. . .the depravity of the enemy has to be seen to be believed. In America, we have no frame of reference for this kind of evil, for individuals whose ability to inflict pain and death on innocent people is limited only by their imagination and power. We have no option but to defeat them, or we (and others in the world) will face truly barbaric terror.

Maybe this characterization of the enemy is inevitable, especially among those whose lives are at risk, and who may have to kill. We need only remember the American caricatures of Germans in WW I, the Japanese in WW II, or the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. And it’s certainly not just an American habit. I agree that the tactics of Al Qaeda and other insurgents are heartless and appalling, and I can’t imagine the depths of suffering that American and allied troops, and the many more Iraqi and Afghan civilians, have experienced. To portray the enemy as irrational beasts perhaps is a useful way to mobilize home-front support for a dubious war and occupation. But it’s not smart way to comprehend an enemy who no doubt has logic, a rationale, even if we find their means and ends detestable.

French goes on to quote the Bible to back up his claim:

"Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” Galatians 6:9

If a Christian doubts that fighting al-Qaida and trying to give Iraqis a chance to live a decent life is not “doing good,” then they neither understand our enemy nor the plight of the people of Iraq.

Well, this begs the question of what is “good,” yet, rhetorically, we are put in a position of not being able to ask this because the implication here is that if we’re not there with French, if we’re not sharing his role, than we cannot understand. While I agree I cannot know what it’s like to be in combat, being in the thick of it doesn’t necessarily give one the basis to claim that the invasion and occupation of Iraq is “doing good.”

But Captain French has another basis for making the claim. The war is about Christianity versus idolaters. In responding to a question of his opinion about the future for Christians in the US, he said:

. . .there remain millions upon millions of Americans who have not “bowed the knee to Baal,” and so long as that remains true, there is great hope.

If you don’t believe me, spend five minutes out here in eastern Diyala province, then go back to America. You’ll see our country with new eyes.

So we now have the picture. A powerful country with a core of proper believers who are holding moral decay of non-Christians at bay on the homefront, while engaging a barbarous, Baal-worshipping enemy abroad.

I suspect this picture isn’t widely shared among Americans, but it sure has been prominently displayed, and it mirrors the narrative we tell ourselves about Islamic fundamentalism--a core of jihadists bound and determined to rescue their nation from modernists and from the satanic West.

Growing religious partisanship

Today’s online Inside Higher Education briefly reports on Liberty University’s refusal to officially recognize the campus Democratic Club.  The group can still meet on campus, but it cannot use the Liberty name, nor receive university financial support.  Liberty officials said the university could not give its stamp of approval to a group associated with a political party that supports pro-choice positions.  You may recall that the late Jerry Falwell founded Liberty University, so the decision is hardly out of the blue.

The story draws on a Lynchburg News Advance article about the Virginia Governor Kaine’s request that Liberty reconsider denying the Democratic Club equal support (Kaine is, after all, the chair of the Democratic National Committee).  The headlines of both are obvious in sentiment.  The New Advance headline has a little fun with irony: “Kaine urges Liberty to reverse ‘attack on the liberty of its students.”  Inside Higher Education suggests totalitarianism: “One Party State at Liberty U.”

There was a small flurry of reader commentaries, 65 or so by around 20 people.  A few took the side of Governor Kaine, a few said good riddance with the Democrats. Two people dominated the discussion.  “Arthur Pewty” crudely parodied conservative Christians and conspiracy theorists.  “Gordie” earnestly argued back from a liberal Christian perspective (and complained it was hard to know when Pewty was being “sarcastic”).  While Pewty egged on one conspiracy theorist trotting out the urban legends of Obama’s radical Muslim sympathies (“You are SO RIGHT Mr. VinceP1974!”), Gordy had a meltdown:

I am sick and tired of low lifes like you and I will fight you every step of the written word that I can find allowable on this forum. I am sick of it and all the lies that the Republican scum of this earth and the distorting of issues or using words to suit their purpose. You and your kind will be in my prayers to vanish from this earth. You, Rush, Fox and all that are like them shall be dammed till eternity.

Perhaps Pewty giggled over this, for pranksters like to get an outraged response, but it's too bad that both sides of the debate resorted to vitriol. Fortunately, we can’t take this online discussion as representative of Americans, as if this were a fray amidst a much larger Culture War.  Typically, only people with deep feelings about a particular issue, what survey researchers call “intensity,” are the ones to participate in online forums.

Still, Liberty University’s action, and those debating it, echo a shift in the relationship between religion and political parties.  Referring once again to my trusty Pew Foundation source, a recent report on “Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes, 1987-2009” finds a growing difference between the Democrats and Republicans in terms of “religious traditionalism.”  Respondents were asked three questions to determine their level of traditionalism.  To what degree to you agree or disagree with the following statements: 1) Prayer is an important part of my daily life; 2) We will all be called before God at Judgment Day to answer for our sins; and 3) I never doubt the existence of God.  The chart below tracks the percentage people who agree with all three statements, by party and over time.

What’s remarkable is how close the Demos and GOP were just a decade ago, when we look at all voters.  But more remarkable is the shift among White Non-Hispanics, increasingly polarized.  There’s a reversal of this trend in the last year, but looking at the two decades as a whole, it’s not likely a permanent trend.  Over the same time period, a growing percentage of people say they completely agree with all three statements (40% in 2009), while a growing number of people also describe themselves as affiliated with no particular religion, or as “atheists, agnostics, or ‘nothing in particular’” (16% in 2009).  In other words, the US population features an increasing number of fervent religious traditionalists, and those who are decidedly not (though the former outweigh the latter).

The puzzle then is, if such a large minority of Americans are traditionalists, and these traditionalists are flying to the GOP banner, why were the Republicans trounced so thoroughly in the 2006 and 2008 elections?  The Pew study suggests one reason. The “percentage with conservative views on social values has been steadily declining over the past two decades” especially among younger generations.  Religiosity has surged, but the mores informing that religiosity have shifted.  Or, we could say that this religiosity has contributed to shifting mores, or at least accommodated it.  Whatever the relationship, the GOP policy positions on social issues have lost supporters.  Of course, war and scandal didn’t help Republicans much either.

So, Liberty University’s partisan decision represents the growing religious divide between Republicans and Democrats.  I’m not sure, though, that purifying the ranks is going to help the Republicans all that much, especially if it’s not certain that religious traditionalists can be trusted to adhere to standard GOP positions.