It goes without saying that the caustic spirit and uncertainties of Buchanan’s age did not dissipate as the twentieth century turned to the twenty-first; quite the opposite. Morally charged concerns that divide progressivism and orthodoxy, as well as debates over the nature of American identity and purpose, and the very nature of truth itself, continue to animate the American citizenry, splitting it into distinctive blocs. More than ever, politicians like the ones who first noticed the benefits of polarizing the American voting public for their own personal ends in the 1970s and 1980s continue to stoke the flames of animosity with their heated rhetoric and their framing of single issue campaigns in momentous terms, as a fight for the very soul of a nation teetering on collapse. As I write this, with President Donald Trump in power, culture war politicking has reached an unprecedented level of intensity, with aggressive political posturing, pressing anxieties fed by a seemingly omnipotent and relentless mass media, and a widespread desperation to fix a broken nation a daily norm purposefully nurtured and prodded by the White House’s primary resident.
While the culture war of the past generation remains a real and serious conflagration, polarization an ongoing concern, stark political divisions of the kind promoted and imposed by politicians and the media do not tell the whole story of religion and politics in the modern age.
Lost in the clamor of Buchanan’s day—as well as our own—are the more substantial evidences of a robust pluralism that sparked and continues to spark religious and political thought and action across pronounced divides. In his recent book, Confident Pluralism, legal theorist John Inazu acknowledges that “at least some of our most important beliefs cannot be reconciled with one another.” “It cannot be the case,” for example, “that the act of abortion is both morally acceptable and morally intolerable. It cannot be the case that God exists and that God does not exist.” The differences James Davison Hunter pointed out twenty-five years ago, in other words, are structurally embedded in American society, and do matter, for everyone. Yet Inazu also asserts in normative fashion that these divisions do not need to be so destructive or paralyzing for this nation’s citizenry. American citizens, he charges, need to reclaim their nation’s founding creed of pluralism, embrace differences in believes, values, and identities without becoming mired in crass and unbending politicking, and most importantly reconstruct a robust civil society based on age-old constitutional principles of “toleration over protest, humility over defensiveness, and persuasion over coercion.” If overly hopeful in his assessment, Inazu nevertheless points to the potentials of encounter, engagement, and even exchange that still exist in the vast political terrain between the right-left, Republican-Democratic poles that this country’s politicians, pundits, preachers, and lobbyists have accentuated for political gain. Rapprochement as much as trench warfare is the natural order in the two-hundred-and-fifty-year-long American experiment, Inazu insists, and it is time that Americans re-internalize that fact.
If Inazu’s is a prescriptive challenge to the culture warring that has plagued American society over the past few generations, scholars can and should engage in a descriptive challenge to that same condition. In their own, unintended way, political and religious historians have perpetuated the culture war motif during the past waves of scholarship, in large part by presuming the political discord that Pat Buchanan and his cohort on the political right harped on in an effort to advance their populist revolution. This is not to say that historians have willingly appropriated the politically charged language of stark difference, or sought to perpetuate the battles Buchanan helped instigate, but rather that they have tended to write about recent trajectories in U.S. faith and politics through the lens that Buchanan-styled politicos have provided the American public, that which sees the nation (and the world) as inevitably and inexorably combative and bloody terrains.
Consider the evolving history of American evangelicalism, for instance. During the past fifteen years, historians of evangelicalism have done much to correct previous scholarly misconceptions, which tended to portray the movement as a marginal political force prior to its purported shotgun wedding with Ronald Reagan in 1980. They have tracked evangelical political ambitions and impact back to the early days of the twentieth century; they have unpacked the complex economic and political circumstances at midcentury, in the time between Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, which thrust evangelicals into the forefront of public debate over vital domestic and foreign policy concerns; and they have drastically expanded our knowledge of how, during the 1970s’ “Age of Evangelicalism,” they built on pre-existing institutional structures of influence to seize control of the Republican Party and usher it into the post-1980 conservative epoch. Yet in offering that corrective, historians of evangelicalism have also reinforced the notion that the history of America’s twentieth century—certainly its post-1945 years—can and should be presented as a tale of perpetual and seemingly inevitable struggle between two diametrically opposed classes of fundamentalists and modernists, right-wingers and left-wingers. Recent histories of liberal Protestants and Protestantism have added complexity to that paradigm by mapping out the presence and resilience of “cosmopolitan” and confidently pluralistic faiths in the late twentieth century, as well as documenting the emergence of the religious “nones”—“spiritual but not religious” American believers whose numbers have risen dramatically in recent years. These and other recent histories of non-Protestant religious actors have served to remind us that the American religious and political landscape is far more fluid and complex than any history of an ascending and ascendant right-wing evangelicalism can convey.
Still, much of the history of modern American religion and politics continues to be written in a mode that assumes the dichotomies and accentuates the us-versus-them embattlements of the modern age. Considering the proliferation of first-wave scholarship on Trump and his steadfast evangelical followers, it is likely that the culture war motif will continue to be a dominant one for years to come, and rightly so considering the heat that the president has generated by playing to the worst fears of those across the entire political spectrum. Recent stellar books examining the religious politics of race and gender in the Trump era are but one sign that the embattlements of today are bitter and real and in need of further attention by historians who can contextualize the most recent dispensation of culture-warring politics in the longue duree.
While fully recognizing the stark reality of our ongoing culture wars, and the historians’ imperative to parse out the issues, interests, values, and collective imaginations that divide the nation, this volume seeks to encourage historians also to pursue histories of modern U.S. religion and politics in ways that stretch our narratives and analysis beyond overly static tropes. As a whole, this book’s authors seek to write their histories with a sharp eye for contingencies and temporalities, unintended consequences and counter-narratives left unaccounted for and stuck in between the rigid right-left, conservative-liberal binaries that still organize our texts. As a group they agree that political categories are fluid, and do not always line up neatly with culture war concerns of the kind highlighted by Pat Buchanan and James Davison Hunter, and that enduring partisan divides can blind us to more complex and dynamic intersections of faith and politics that transpire and exist outside an unbending dualistic paradigm.
