{"id":8807,"date":"2020-02-25T10:14:16","date_gmt":"2020-02-25T15:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/?p=8807"},"modified":"2021-04-23T14:51:03","modified_gmt":"2021-04-23T18:51:03","slug":"dispatches-from-the-culture-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/dispatches-from-the-culture-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"Dispatches from the Culture Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left<\/em>, the first book from L. Benjamin Rolsky, illuminates our current political moment by examining famed television producer Norman Lear\u2019s career as an example of liberal religious mobilization in opposition to the rise of the Religious Right in the public sphere in the 1970s. We asked Rolsky, an adjunct professor in Monmouth\u2019s Department of History and Anthropology, about his research and reflections on these \u201cCulture Wars,\u201d and how he plans to continue his scholarship in that area. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What\u2019s the \u201celevator pitch\u201d for your book? <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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This is a story about the Religious Left[1]<\/a>, which is in the news all over the place these days\u2014 you watch any kind of Democratic debate and it\u2019ll come up. But it\u2019s really the story of Norman Lear and his career in media from All in the Family <\/em>to his nonprofit organization, People for\nthe American Way[2]<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book uses Lear as a case study for a broader understanding\nof politics: a progressive, civically minded vision of the public square that\nsays, \u201cWe don\u2019t put a bigot on TV because we agree with the bigot; we put a\nbigot on TV because he\u2019s going to put a mirror up to the rest of us so we can\ntheoretically become better citizens.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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How was a sitcom like All in the Family <\/em>supposed to accomplish something like that? <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Archie Bunker[3]<\/a>is a poster child for what happened politically during the early 1970s. He\u2019s someone who grew up during the Great Depression and the New Deal. He supported Democrats at one point because they were about\nlabor and working class issues. But then you have conservatives coming along who are very good at getting the idea out there that someone like Archie has more to fear from minorities than he does from anyone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The liberal religious approach to societal change is to tweak\nthe structures of society so that individuals will then act accordingly,\nwhereas the conservative approach is to change the heart in order to change\nsociety. So the assumption with All in the Family <\/em>is that the audience\nwill see Archie Bunker and understand that it\u2019s satire. Lear\u2019s programming\nisn\u2019t going to tell you what to think. It\u2019ll give you the viewpoints; it\u2019ll\ngive you the conversation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lear represents the pinnacle of that type of cultural influence\nand power. All in the Family <\/em>was on at a time when there were only three\nnetworks, so hundreds of millions of people a week could watch the show. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Did Lear\u2019s approach to politics and societal change actually work? <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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I think it\u2019s a very ambivalent legacy. My argument is that when\nDemocrats started reaching out to minority communities of various sorts, Republicans\nsaid, \u201cOK, we\u2019re going to bring over the Archie Bunkers of the world, we\u2019re\ngoing to double down on those people for the foreseeable future.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think the biggest na\u00efvet\u00e9 of Lear and the Religious Left was\nthat if you put the right stuff in front of people, then they\u2019ll make the best\nchoices. Take All in the Family <\/em>as an example: You put the bigot in\nfront of people and you assume that they won\u2019t be as racist over time. That was\nthe perspective of Carroll O\u2019Connor, the actor who played Archie Bunker. He\nsaid that Archie is really meant for the dustbin of history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But then you\u2019re kind of leaving behind a group of people who are\ngoing to feel ignored, and they\u2019re going to feel condescended to\u2014right up until\nthe conservative advertisement that says, \u201cAre you worried about the person of\ncolor that\u2019s going to take your job? Then vote for us; we\u2019re going to make sure\nthat doesn\u2019t happen.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the Religious Left of the time wasn\u2019t necessarily a coalition, or even a movement, because it wasn\u2019t that well organized. It wasn\u2019t pragmatic, it was aspirational. It wasn\u2019t like the fine-tuned campaigns of the Religious Right[4]<\/a>,which only invested time, money, and campaigning when the return on investment was going to be appropriate. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

We don\u2019t put a bigot on TV because we agree with the bigot; we put a bigot on TV because he\u2019s going to put a mirror up to the rest of us so we can theoretically become better citizens.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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So despite Norman Lear\u2019s domination of TV programming in the 1970s, you say that the Religious Left still experienced a significant fall. Why? <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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People usually talk about this period as the \u201cCulture Wars.\u201d\nIt\u2019s that period of time since the 1960s when we stopped arguing about things\nlike gross domestic product and started arguing about who people should sleep\nwith. Politics since the 1960s became about hot-button social issues. I think\nthat helped the Religious Left when it was about civil rights, but I think it\nhurt them when it came to abortion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you make a movement about civil rights, you\u2019re reducing\nvery broad traditions\u2014like Judaism or Christianity\u2014down to particular issues of\nimportance. But that way of mobilizing for something like civil rights, with\nexplicitly moral, Christian language, then allows the rights of the unborn to\nbecome a moral, theological issue, too. Who gets to decide what those issues of\nimportance are going to be? In one moment, it\u2019s going to be civil rights, and\nin another it\u2019s going to be the unborn fetus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Single-issue politics might be good if you are in favor of the\nissue\u2014whether it\u2019s civil rights or gay marriage\u2014but I don\u2019t think that reducing everything down to these things helped progressives at all. I think if anything it turned politics into marketing and market research. Religious conservatives came up with things like Bible Scorecards[5]<\/a> in the 1970s to help citizens understand and judge the politicians based on how they answered questions about certain theological issues. The Religious Right has a certain understanding of how to be political, an understanding of how to mobilize people. For them, politics is not about widening the circle and bringing in a diversity of people, it\u2019s about winning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another part of the fall is that religious liberals have become too comfortable with turning on something like The Colbert Report <\/em>and thinking that was their political act for the day. I think they\u2019ve gotten comfortable with a certain type of cultural influence that didn\u2019t necessarily translate into the day-to-day mobilization and activism that you need to actually make things happen. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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So what should those who consider themselves to be on the Religious Left do today? <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Those who ascribe to or identify with the Religious Left have to\ndo a little self-examination. I think a simple suggestion would be to start\ntalking to the Archie Bunkers again. We\u2019ve ignored them for a very long time,\nand in many ways they\u2019ve come back with a vengeance\u2014and we wonder why. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of the reason is, we\u2019ve been distracted by the racist\nthings they\u2019ve said. Racism is obviously something that we should be concerned\nwith; but at the same time, Archie Bunker\u2019s paycheck was dwindling. He was also\nsuffering under the conditions that led to the death of the working class. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you want anything to change, you\u2019re going to have to think\nabout how you engage in politics a little bit more pragmatically. You can\u2019t\njust assume that with something like immigration, for example, people are going\nto come up with the best decision. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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What\u2019s next for your scholarship? <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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I have a tentative title for my next book: Establishments and Their Fall: Direct Mail, the New Right, and the Remaking of American Politics<\/em>. E.J. Dionne wrote a book[6]<\/a> about how the Republican Party has tried to purify itself since Barry Goldwater\u2014purifying in the sense that they\u2019ve gotten rid of the most moderate dimensions of the party. My contribution to that conversation would be an analysis of the forms of communication and technology that were used to make that purification possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did Republican PR people learn from Barry Goldwater\u2019s failed\ncampaigns? How did the New Right strategists in the 1970s deploy and use the\nmailing lists of Goldwater to connect people in a way that they had never been\nconnected before? What if direct mail starts to reach these people in their\nmailboxes and they then know they\u2019re not alone? That the Religious Right will\ndefend their Christian values to the hilt? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Direct mail was a way of bringing people together in a\nrelatively inexpensive way that gave them a sense of identity, that let them\nknow they were part of something bigger. How are you going to get that\nhousewife from suburbia to get off her couch? You\u2019re going to tell her that\nthere are people moving into her neighborhood; you\u2019re going to tell her that\nwhat people do in the privacy of their own homes affects everyone, right?\nThat\u2019s the brilliance of conservative argumentation. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Footnotes<\/h4>\n\n\n

1. LBR: The Religious Left is an understanding of religion\nand its sacred texts that speaks to social concerns, rather than having some\nsort of \u201cborn-again\u201d conversion experience. We can talk about the Religious Left\nas part of American religious liberalism, a broader tradition that includes\nWalt Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau, etc. Lear\u2019s career in media is representative\nof a Religious Left understanding of American religion and politics from\noutside the confines of traditionally institutional settings such as churches\nor synagogues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. People for the American Way is an advocacy group founded by Lear in 1980 to educate by combating the seemingly invasive media-savvy agenda of the newly formed Christian Right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. The patriarch of the 1970s sitcom All in the Family<\/em> was a bluntly bigoted WWII veteran and warehouse dock worker who drove a taxi for extra income and lived in a row house with his family in Queens, New York. He was portrayed as being stubborn with his adult daughter, Gloria; argumentative with his liberal son-in-law, Mike, whom he dubbed \u201cMeathead\u201d; and dismissive and condescending toward his deferential wife, Edith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. The terms \u201cReligious Right,\u201d \u201cChristian Right,\u201d and \u201cNew\nChristian Right\u201d are largely interchangeable, and can be understood both as a\ncollection of organizations, groups, and individuals who organized on a\ngrassroots level, and as shorthand for a group of people led not only by\ntelevangelists but also by savvy political advisers. The \u201cNew Right\u201d describes\na conservative political movement between 1955 and 1964 that centered around\nright-wing libertarians, traditionalists, and anti-communists at William F.\nBuckley\u2019s National Review<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. The Bible Scorecard, sometimes referred to as a Biblical\nScorecard, was a direct mail questionnaire authored by Evangelical pastor Jerry\nFalwell and other members of the Religious Right in the late 1970s to mobilize\npreviously inactive Christians in American presidential elections. The\nquestionnaire scored all the candidates on the purported moral issues of the\nelection (e.g., abortion, homosexuality, and national defense).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism\u2014From Goldwater to Trump and Beyond<\/em>. E.J. Dionne is an American journalist, political commentator, and frequent op-ed columnist for The Washington Post<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

L. Benjamin Rolsky\u2019s new book documents the spiritual politics of television producer Norman Lear and the Religious Left.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":8826,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"image_focus":"","hide_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-currents"],"thumbnail":"\"\"","catString":"Currents","issue":"Spring 2020","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/60"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8807"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9455,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8807\/revisions\/9455"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}