C'mon Charlie Brown, kick the football

Carol Iannone replies to Heather MacDonald's call for an accomodation with secular conservatives with the cautionary rejoinder that "we tried that once, and we were taken to the cleaners":

I am following with some interest the ongoing debate on religion between Heather Mac Donald and her friendly adversaries at The Corner and today at NRO. Heather is dismayed to hear so many public expressions of religion from conservatives and believes that conservatism needs no religious basis but can rely soly on reason.

The irony is that this public expression of belief is actually a quite recent development. From what I can make out, and forgive this rather crude summary, a bargain was struck many years ago, certainly by mid-twentieth century, that religious believers would leave aside their beliefs when entering public debate. Any intellectual argument had to be handled on the basis of reason, just as Heather advances now. At a certain point, however, believers began to realize that this may have been a devil's bargain. The public arena had not become neutral territory given to reason but a place where atheism and materialism were aggressively able to ascend while believers remained tongue-tied. The Supreme Court decisions outlawing prayer in the schools were only the most visible example. Then, when the counterculture began destroying the traditional understandings that had held America together, even without necessarily mentioning God, conservative believers seriously started to question the old bargain. That's sort of where Father Neuhaus and his criticism of the naked public square and all that came in.

Say what?? Iannone's revisionist history is breathtaking in its cluelessness, but it is a perfect example of the religious conservative "litany", a well rehearsed shorthand view of history in which all was good in society until the radical secular agenda destroyed everything of value in American society. I'm reminded of other ideological litanies, such as the environmental litany propounded by Jared Diamond in his book "Collapse" whereby the collapse of dead civilizations can simplistically be blamed on bad environmental policies.

Can anyone point to any historical event that resembles the "bargain" she refers to? When, prior to 1960, did religious politicians and intellectuals forswear public religious language for the benefit of including secular people? Was it in 1954 when President Dwight D Eisenhower signed the Congressional resolution adding the words "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance? Was it during the 1950's Red Scare when atheism was publicly reviled as the ideology of our arch enemy, the Soviet Union?

And was this "bargain" somehow legally binding on religious people? Were they really constrained from injecting religious viewpoints as they watched radical secularists, to quote Iannone, "destroying the traditional understandings that had held America together"? Was it really the case that dismayed believers said to themselves "I really wish I could counter these atheistic arguments that are destroying the soul of America, but since I am a man of my word, I must honor my part of the bargain"?

She continues:

America seemed to be growing more undisciplined, hedonistic, materialistic, hyper-individualistic, self-indulgent, and so on. Divorce and llegitimacy arose alarmingly, family life was eroding, and one Supreme Court decision after another seemed to remove any vestige of traditional understanding from the conduct of life and of the individual. Believers realized that their bargain was a premature surrender and decided they wouldn't be silent anymore. They took off the white glove and entered the public arena. I remember the amazement I felt when I read that full-page ad some Christian group took out years ago listing the various pronouncements about the importance of religion in our system of representational government on the part of the Founding Fathers.

It wasn't easy because the rationalists, some of whom were great and brilliant people, did not welcome the encroachment. If William Buckley, say, wrote the merest half-sentence in an article suggesting that a society required a belief in something higher than itself, Sidney Hook would leap into print to stomp on any such notion, tear it into shreds, and scatter the shreds to the wind. Hook is mainly an admirable figure, a very early critic of the irrationalism that would overtake the American university and founder of the aptly named University Center for Rational Alternatives, but I believe he did a lot of harm with his single-mindedness and his aggressive and rather arrogant atheism. Asked what he would do if he found out after death that God does exist, he said He would tell God He hadn't provided enough evidence. Ok, it's cute, but it's also arrogant.

America may have been growing more individualistic and hedonistic, but you have to be intellectualy lazy and incurious to the point of being brain dead to attribute this social trend to the effects of an accomodation of secular thought in the public sphere. Somehow a court case that was decided in 1963 to ban prayer from public school had the effect of bringing about a slackening of individual and public morality that had its roots in such landmark events as the rise of Playboy, hipster & drug culture, rock and roll and the youth movement, the public respectability of divorce, all which began in the 1950s, and the birth control pill which was approved by the FDA 3 years before the Supreme Court banned prayer in public schools.

Yet this is the popular litany that is repeated ad nauseum by religious social conservatives scapegoating athiests and secular minded people for everything that went wrong with American culture from 1960 on. Iannone's seeming lack of interest in providing facts supporting her analysis just shows how widespread acceptance of the litany has become through constant repetition. Iannone is probably of the younger set of conservatives too young to have experienced the 60's firsthand, and who has been raised on a steady diet of religious conservative commentary without the curiosity to actually fact-check the worldview she has inherited. But, as Orrin would no doubt approve, she gets extra credit for conformity, and that is what American culture is all about, right?

The reality of the situation is that America was predominantly religious before and during the Countercultural revolution of the 1960's, and remains so today. American culture was never under the control of an athiestic mindset. It was largely ordinary religious people who subscribed to Playboy, took advantage of no-fault divorce, took the pill, tuned in, turned on, dropped out, experimented with alternative lifestyles, and then largely settled down and went to work. The religous conservatives will point to a great revival of religion following in the wake of the 60's and 70's, and they are correct. But the inconvenient truth is that most of the alternate lifestyles of the counterclture period are still with us. We just don't notice it because the counterculture of then is the culture of now. Sexual promiscuity is a permanent reality of our culture. So is drug use. So is divorce. So is pornography. All this among the most religious "developed" population on the planet.

I'll inject one personal anecdote for your perusal. My ex-wife tells me of an acquaintance of hers who is a fundamentalist Christian who attends only the most fiery of fire and brimstone churches and who scolds her for buying into the lie of evolution. This person is also a confirmed bachelor and abuser of alcohol, marijuana and occasionally cocaine, who sleeps with women he has no intention of marrying and who frequents nudie bars. Now anecdotes do not prove trends, but it is also true that most people's experiences are generally not unique to them. What is noteworthy about this person is that he is not particularly noteworthy.

And yet the need to scapegoat athiests through the Litany continues, because although it is not news that people are contradictory animals, it is also true that people seek comforting and self-serving explanations to deal with those contradictions. Honest believers will deal with their own contradictions by admitting their own faults, as this article from Christianity Today does. Dishonest believers will scapegoat others by repeating the Litany.