Two conventions, two nominees, and a whole new culture war

Excerpts

Since the late 1970s, the political battle lines in the culture war have been clearly drawn and easily understood.

On one side, Republicans claimed a seemingly unassailable moral high ground built on appeals to faith, patriotism, family values, personal character and biblical standards of sexuality.

Democrats, on the other side, largely avoided engaging the GOP on its home turf, shunning anything that smacked of moralism and sticking to general principles about tolerance and respect for personal choices.

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But by the time the closing gavel came down near midnight Thursday (July 28) on the Democratic National Convention, the entire battlefield in the culture wars had shifted — dramatically.
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A week earlier in Cleveland, the Republican convention had nominated Donald Trump, a brash New York real estate magnate and reality TV personality who has been married three times and has spoken derisively of women, immigrants and Muslims. 
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God also went unmentioned and virtually unrecognized in Trump’s speech, which made a passing reference to evangelicals who supported him in the primaries. Throughout the campaign Trump has struggled to speak convincingly or with any fluency about faith and his own beliefs and he made no attempt to elevate his God-talk game in Cleveland.

Nor was Trump, or any of the other speakers over the four days in Cleveland, much interested in traditional culture war topics.
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Abortion was never cited in Trump’s 75-minute speech, the first time since 1980 that a nominee had passed over the topic — and few others at the convention raised what is a premier issue for Christian conservatives, a fact widely noted by anti-abortion groups.

Religious freedom, also a prominent agenda item for the religious right, was given short shrift and Trump went out of his way to vow to protect “our LGBT citizens.” 
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“Where are the values at the Republican National Convention?” a Catholic News Agency headline asked. The GOP “barely tried to pretend that its candidate cares about abortion, sexuality, or God,” as the Christian writer Ruth Graham put it in a Slate essay.

Trump’s convention speech “was almost entirely secular,” said Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, an evangelical and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. “Faith-based supporters were only mentioned as another interest group at the long trough of his promises. Larger religious themes that often inform American public rhetoric — human dignity, social justice, the possibility of redemption — were absent.”
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Then came the Democratic convention
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after the first day of restiveness the convention’s speakers increasingly spoke with the vocabulary of faith and moral righteousness and in the oratorical register of a tent revival.
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By the time Thursday rolled around, the Democrats were in full family values, American-as-apple-pie mode, and they were selling it to a liberal crowd — and a huge television audience — as the party’s natural stance.

Promoting the common good, defending the weak, providing good jobs, and working for equal rights for all were recast in biblical terms in a crescendo of faith-speak that scrambled the usual left-right categories and peaked with a fiery address by the Rev. William Barber, an African-American pastor from North Carolina known for a series of “Moral Mondays” protests for social justice.

“I know it may sound strange,” the charismatic Barber intoned to a chorus of cheers, “but I’m a conservative because I worked to conserve a divine tradition that teaches us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.”

African-American pastors and speakers often provided much of the convention’s spiritual uplift, as Slate’s Jamelle Bouie noted, along with the contributions of other minority religious groups — and that was yet another statement that diversity was a sacred thing, a source of inspiration rather than fear.
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When Clinton herself took the stage, she hit all those themes and made sure to mention God, her Methodist faith, her love of country and praise for the military and law enforcement.

As many commentators noted, the Democrats were clearly trying to occupy some of the political terrain that was effectively surrendered by Republicans. “The last four days has been a journey from the left-most edge of the Democratic coalition to the right-most edge,” said MSNBC’s Christopher Hayes.

But more than political positioning or taking an advantage the GOP handed them, Democratic leaders were also redefining the terms of the battle — or perhaps recapturing a lost language of faith as a vehicle for progressive causes.
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This effort went beyond the old idea of creating a “religious left” to counter the old “religious right.”

In this new-old vision, gay families are to be valued as much as any other family, helping single and working mothers is a holy duty, and defending one’s nation in the armed forces is an honorable calling — and for women, gays and minorities, as much as anyone.
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But if this new formulation carries Clinton to the White House, the GOP will have to figure out what remains of the culture war terrain to claim as their own.


http://religionnews.com/2016/07/29/two-conventions-two-nominees-and-a-whole-new-culture-war/

Last edited by Goose (7/30/2016 10:35 am)