-Culture WAR-

This is an interesting topic. I think we've covered it exhaustively.

Here are the main points of the discussion:

JH

·         Political versus cultural war

o   Culture drive pol or politics drive culture?

·         Skewed b/c extreme ends are loud whereas middle is quiet—make 12-15% on each end, less than half of those are active

o   Middle not clearly defined or purposeful

·         Media/political elites have huge role in polarizing debates…

·         Culture is only symbolic (?)

AW

·         Must look at both individual behavior and focus on timeless institutions, focusing on either exclusively downplays tht other.

·         Division between and within people: traditionalist (old religion and morals) and modern people (indiv. adnd social libertarian)

o   “flexidox”

·         “The point I want to make is this: if the notion of the right to life is so culturally embedded, if it is supposed to have such deep religious roots, if it is supposed to be one of those timeless things and then politics is epiphenomenal against that, how could it possibly change so radically? It seems to me that what we witnessed in this shift from one side to the other on this issue was in fact politics becoming much more important than religion. It wasn't that religion was the timeless thing at all. In its new formulation of these issues, the Southern Baptist Convention and its leaders talk about accommodationism between state and church rather than strict separation of state and church.

·         But, again, all of these things suggest to me that what happened in the United States, using this as an example, is that politics was enormously important for people, to the point where their position on a political issue determined their theological and religious views, and not the other way around. It couldn't have been that religious and theological views came first and political views came second and led to this change. It had to be the other way around.”7

·         Religion will (hopefully) return to a “suspicion of politics, a suspicion of too much of a worldly engagement in what are very much political rather than timeless matters.”

·         Instead of disagreements between religions, it’s now within religios groups: liberal vs conservative

·         22 But also, under the surface, movement towards united religions/hostile between rel

o   Not a cath/prot political coalition (or prot/jew, islam..)

o               Didn’t really happen yet, even with Romney’s MORMONISM

·         No real, big issues in America, so the idea of culture wars filled the gap.

Opened to questions, covered specifics about immigration, England/Eiurope, other points I have added in above… judges aren’t going to be bad, we can trust that... lots of stuff about specific people that probably isn’t relevant anymore…

Here're my articles:

• http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/the-persistence-of-the-culture-war/
• http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/01/why-the-culture-war-is-the-wrong-war/304502/
• TIME website doesn't have the full article, see http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2126664,00.html

Is there a culture war? Yeah, but it's not nearly as important, widespread, or passionate as the media make it seem. For the most part Americans don't care too much about the issues that (according to the political world) seem to be tearing the country in half. The media and the people entertained by the media need an issue to latch onto, and this provides that "hook." It seems to be driven by the differences between the conservative religious force in our society and the more modern, independent style of thinking. These have always existed, but now the News feels compelled to argue about which is "better." From a wider perspective this isn't so bad, and it's a good way to keep extremists' energy focused on something non-destructive, even if it is annoying for the rest of us.