Is racism more important than income?

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http://www.suntimes.com/news/greeley/1154192,CST-EDT-greel10.article

September 10, 2008

ANDREW GREELEY [e-mail]

The sudden new vitality in the "born again" political moments has raised the question of the resurgence of "culture wars" -- the allegedly polarizing struggle between the religious right and the liberal left over such issues as gay marriage and abortion and evolution. In fact, the culture wars are mystical, indeed mythological, and they exist only in the interstices of the news cycle --that is to say Never-Never Land. They consist of press releases and statements made by the leaders of activist movements to fill up vacant space and time when nothing else is appearing on the cable networks.

The activists are not so much trying to scare their enemies as to scare their allies about what the enemies are plotting. Americans are not a people who tend to polarization. Rather, almost unreflectively, they try to seize the sensible middle ground. The serious research on polarization shows that it mostly is the noise generated in battles between activist leadership, between for example those who see dire threats to "the family" from gay marriage and those who argue there is a constitutional right for gays to celebrate their unions with rituals. The vast middle ground is occupied by the rest of the population who see nothing wrong with civil unions.

Many of the "born again" movements tell us that they are merely trying to take America back from the liberals who, for example, are imposing the theology of Darwin on schoolchildren. Americans, they argue, have the right to demand equal time for their explanations and thus exclude evolution as "science" from the classroom and, while they're at it, to ban "obscene" books from libraries.

The politics of the "born agains" are both serious and sincere. However, they want to impose their religious convictions on the rest of the country by political power. The project is profoundly un-American and potentially dangerous. However, they do not have the power, save in some limited regions of the country, to accomplish their goals. My colleague Professor Michael Hout and I have written a book called The Truth about Conservative Christians which demolishes some of the myths about the born-again movements.