In a recent Mortification of Spin podcast, the hosts, Carl Trueman (click here for a bio) and Todd Pruitt (click here for a very brief bio) address the subject of culture wars. In that podcast, Trueman and Pruitt not only engage in some seslf-congratulatory behavior in the conflict, they, Trueman in particular, equate what should be the Christian view of culture wars with conservatism. But more importantly, they show a complete misunderstanding of what a culture war is. And thus they mistakenly equate culture wars with how one or both sides address the other (click here for a link to the podcast).
In their podcast, Trueman and Pruitt discuss where the term 'culture war' came from. According to them, the first use of the term was made by Pat Buchanan when he was involved in politics. If memory serves, Buchanan, an authoritarian at heart, warned fellow conservatives of the advances that non-conservatives were making in becoming culturally influential. And thus Buchanan was warning his fellow conservatives that conservatives would be losing control over culture and society. Such a warning provides a context necessary for understanding the culture wars that we are experiencing today. That context involves a concept not mentioned in my hearing or reading; that context is Culture Imperialism.
Here we should note that before the culture wars began, conservatives had a certain sway over culture to the extent of not only having laws that would enforce some of the values promoted by religiously conservative Christians, but society was marginalizing some who didn't follow those values. We could call this time period one of Conservative Christian Culture Imperialism. In particular, many of those values had to do with sexual practices. Homosexuals in particular were one of the whipping boys of Conservative Christian Culture Imperialism. But we should note that before the end of the Civil Rights Movement, people of color were often targets of this Conservative Christian Imperialism because of some of the ties between religiously conservative Christianity and white supremacy. And, we can use the word 'Imperialism' rather than 'Dominance' because this dominance was once held to throughout Western Civilization.
What justified this Conservative Christian Culture Imperialism was paternalism. Conservative Christianity claimed that the enforcing of its values was what's best for all societies. And thus Conservative Christianity should have some degree of control over the values society was suppose to promote and practice. So, in other words, this Conservative Christian Culture Imperialism was an exercise in Christian paternalism. And though not using the same terminology, this concept of Christian Paternalism was alluded, by Trueman in particular, as he talked about how Christians need to get the message out about what is good for society.
And so while Trueman and Pruitt seem to be singing the Things Ain't What They Use To Be blues about not only the acceptance of homosexuality and the new approaches to gender identity, Thepy seemed to have forgot, or perhaps favored, the context from which this new acceptance emerged. It arose from Conservative Christian Culture Imperialism and the desire to eliminate, and probably forever prevent, a return of that imperialism that has caused so many abuses and atrocities committed against those from the LGBT community and others.
Here we should note that the efforts to address and correct long standing social injustices often result in a phobic type reaction to the past so that beliefs and practices that which were accidentally associated with those past injustices are grouped to together with those beliefs and practices that actually contributed to the injustices. Thus the proverbial baby is often tossed out with the bathwater approach is taken. And that is because of the past injustices, a great reluctance or even complete refusal to extend any effort to distinguish between those beliefs and behaviors that were accidentally associated with the injustices from those beliefs and behaviors that actually contributed to those injustices.
While Trueman and Pruitt equate the hostility of one's interaction with those who hold to different cultural values as being part of culture wars, such is not necessarily true. Rather, if we understand culture wars as a certain kind of response to culture imperialism, then the way to avoid culture wars is to resist culture imperialism and work for culture coexistence instead. That instead of seeking to dominate, we look to share culture and society with others as equals.
What culture coexistence for my fellow religiously conservative Christians and those in the LBGT community could look like is that while both sides would have the right to fully and publicly express what their values are, both sides would advocate for full equality in society for those from the other side.
Of course that means that some beliefs could not be promoted. Those beliefs would be those that deny equality for those who hold to other beliefs. Generally speaking, we already do this in terms of religion and call it the freedom of religion. And we point to the 1st Amendment as supplying the grounds for the coexistence of faiths in our nation.
In short, Trueman and Pruitt, though having some justified criticisms of the new enforced 'orthodoxy' regarding gender identity, need to take a different approach to the new orthodoxy. For example, both many religiously conservative Christians and those from the LGBT community have oversimplified the biological sex vs. gender identity conflict by conflating one side with the other. For while one side states because they are the same, one's biological sex, a physical entity, should dictate what one's gender identity, a social-psychological entity, must be, the other side reverses that. We need to adequately readdress that conflict so that neither biological sex nor gender identity are used to override the other.
We religiously conservative Christians in America and those from the LGBT movement should work for each other's full equality in society. For doing so is to promote culture coexistence. And though I dislike reducing complex issues to binary terms, I'm afraid that the only alternative to culture coexistence is to conduct culture war in order to establish or maintain culture imperialism or dominance.
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