Religious Roots of Polarization

We too often take a false view of the increasing polarization in America. Black Lives Matter exploded onto the scene in summer 2020, giving the impression that the most significant and debilitating divide in American society is racial. I don’t wish to downplay the realities of race in America. But those realities have been longstanding, and it is implausible to think that today’s political polarization runs along the color line. By my reading of recent events, Black Lives Matter is important because of the way it divides white Americans. In January of this year, Joe Biden gave a crudely partisan speech in Atlanta. His accusations of racism had little to do with race and everything to do with his party’s struggle to win votes.

I’d also like to set aside demographic change. The United States reached peak homogeneity in the 1970s, when less than 5 percent of the population was non-­native-born. The percentage has increased every year since, reaching 13 percent in 2010 and today closing in on 15 percent to equal the highest levels in our nation’s history. A dramatic increase in immigration strains a country’s capacity to maintain social cohesion. As Robert Putnam discovered in a study two decades ago, ethnic and cultural diversity reduce social trust. Contrary to what President Obama wished us to believe, diversity is not our strength. So, yes, demographic change is a challenge. But this challenge has little to do with the political and cultural polarization that threatens to shipwreck our society. When Hillary Clinton made her unguarded remark about the “basket of deplorables,” she was not referring to recently arrived immigrants or the black urban underclass. She was targeting white Americans.

Let me try to be more specific. A decade ago, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia produced “Culture of American Families.” (I wrote about the study in this column when it came out, “Responsible Conservatism,” February 2013.) ­Researchers identified four distinct family cultures: the Faithful, ­the Engaged Progressive, the Detached, and American Dreamers. Detached families are not very functional. They are broken, often burdened by poverty, drug abuse, violence, and other social problems. American Dreamers want their kids to move up the ladder. Often immigrant families, they take their cues from the dominant culture, working hard to meet expectations. But who sets the expectations? Who defines the dominant culture?

If you dive into the survey data, you immediately see that the political and cultural battles of recent decades are rooted in the conflict between the culture of the Faithful family and that of Engaged Progressives. I won’t go into detail here, but some data points are telling. Among the Faithful, Republicans outnumber Democrats four to one. Among Engaged Progressives, the reverse is true: Democrats outnumber Republicans four to one. Engaged Progressives champion “diversity” and “inclusion.” Parents want their children to have friends of different races and ethnic backgrounds. But there is one striking exception: Engaged Progressives do not want their children to be friends with Evangelical Christians.

Engaged Progressives versus the Faithful: Polarization in the United States is rooted in an ideological struggle between two strands of the American religious tradition, not in racial antagonisms or ethnic diversity.One strand is the conservative and populist Protestant tradition that goes back to Cane Ridge and the Second Great Awakening, ­supplemented today by conservative Catholics and Orthodox Jews. The other finds its roots in liberal Protestantism and its offshoots, such as Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, and the many movements of progressive reform that were sponsored by mainline Protestant churches in the early to mid-twentieth century.

By the 1960s, the liberal Protestant strand was becoming secularized, incorporating European traditions of secular progressivism. The conservative Protestant tradition likewise adopted secular elements, such as Cold War anti-communism and free-market economics. But in my estimation, there is a striking continuity in our cultural conflicts in the United States, running back at least a hundred years. That conflict is epitomized by the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when one of that era’s towering figures, William Jennings Bryan, endeavored to push back against the dehumanizing materialism of evolutionary science. The old and ailing Great Commoner did not go to Dayton, Tennessee, in order to debate school policy. He meant to put before the American public a spiritual choice and to argue for a view of man as created in the image of God.

The polarization we are experiencing today is not new. To the contrary, our country has often been polarized along similar lines. These conflicts concern fundamental values. The spiritual choice that divides the woke from the anti-woke is not the same one ­Bryan framed, but it similarly implicates core beliefs about what it means to be human, as debates about transgender ideology make clear. It is hard to sustain a society embroiled in tense debates at this level. One disturbing aspect of today’s polarization is that many on the left seem to know this, and yet they escalate their demands.

As Aristotle observed, “Friendship seems to hold states together.” True friendship requires unanimity with regard to the highest good, which means that our nation has for a long time been riven in ways that threaten to tear us apart. And yet we as a nation have not only endured but in many respects prospered. This should give us some confidence that our present polarization, though daunting, need not foretell our doom.