The left won the culture war. Will they be merciful?

There was a thread about this earlier which has been locked. Has the Left won the culture war? Will the Left just wait for the Right to die off?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...5014c2-2024-11e6-8690-f14ca9de2972_story.html

The left won the culture war. Will they be merciful?

Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary via Associated Press)

By Barton Swaim May 27 at 10:56 PM
Barton Swaim is the author of "The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics" and a contributing columnist at The Washington Post.
Barton Swaim is author of “The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics” and a contributing columnist for The Post.

A recent report on NPR began by noting that the arguments of many “conservative Christians” are “being challenged by changing views in society.” I wondered: Is there someone alive who doesn’t know that already? The story went on to explain that some “evangelicals” are embracing liberal social views and some aren’t — an observation made at least a thousand times before, and one entirely dependent on the nebulous descriptor “evangelical.”

One line in the story, though, stood out. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, remarked to the reporter: “We are on the losing side of a massive change that’s not going to be reversed, in all likelihood, in our lifetimes.” In Mohler’s view, the report went on, “Christians must adapt to the changed cultural circumstances by finding a way ‘to live faithfully in a world in which we’re going to be a moral exception.’ ”

Hold on. A high-profile Southern Baptist just conceded that his side lost the culture war. If I had been the reporter, that would have been the story. Yes, Mohler is still enunciating traditionalist views on marriage and sexual morality, views that many on the other side find anachronistic and thus repugnant. But he’s openly conceding that the cultural changes he laments won’t be reversed by some fictional silent majority.

Nor is Mohler alone. Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, has frequently made the same sort of cheerful concession. After the Supreme Court’s decision last year guaranteeing the right of same-sex couples to marry, Moore warned his co-religionists not to panic. Christianity “doesn’t need ‘family values’ to flourish,” he wrote in The Post. “In fact, the church often thrives when it is in sharp contrast to the cultures around it.”

That’s not what Jerry Falwell or James Dobson would have said. Absent is any vow to return the nation to its Judeo-Christian heritage or to “take America back.”

Hardened secularists, I imagine, will see only a rhetorical pivot in these and similar statements from religious conservatives. Mohler and Moore may now claim to relish the virtues of pluralism (so their critics may reason), but their rhetoric merely repackages the Moral Majoritarianism of 30 years ago.

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I don’t think so. Ideological lines in U.S. politics are shifting and blurring rapidly: The rise of Donald Trump, the popularity of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the resurgence of libertarianism prove at least that much. It’s reasonable to assume that religious conservatives, too, are rethinking their role in American society and politics.

That rethinking probably began in earnest with Richard John Neuhaus’s book “The Naked Public Square” in 1984. Neuhaus, acknowledging pluralism as a hard reality rather than condemning it as a temporary deviation, nonetheless sharply criticized the idea that the public sphere can have nothing to do with religiously informed principles and arguments. In 1990, he founded the influential magazine First Things, in which Catholic, Protestant and Jewish intellectuals reflect on the role of religion in America’s rapidly fragmenting society.

More recently, Notre Dame historian George Marsden — a self-described “Augustinian Christian” and so something close to an evangelical, whatever that still means — has argued in his book “The Twilight of the American Enlightenment” that religious traditionalists and secularist liberals can avoid a great deal of acrimony by defenestrating the midcentury idea of a “neutral” public sphere and instead adopting what he and others have termed “principled pluralism.” More recently still, in his new book “The Fractured Republic,” the scholar and journalist Yuval Levin, a Jewish social conservative, has counseled both religious conservatives and secularist liberals that they can repair our dysfunctional politics by comprehending the implications of this one essential truth: that American society is no longer the consolidated unit it once was but a diffuse assortment of subcultures.


True, many religious social conservatives still think it’s their duty to take America back, their disposition expressed in the fierce eloquence of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.). But many do not. Many have finally given up on the whole idea of a culture war or are willing to admit they lost it. They are determined only to remain who they are and to live as amiably and productively as they can in a culture that doesn’t look like them and doesn’t belong to them.

In time, this shift in outlook may bring about a more peaceable public sphere. But that will depend on others — especially the adherents of an ascendant social progressivism — declining to take full advantage of their newfound cultural dominance. I see few signs of that, but I am hopeful all the same.

Read more on this topic:

Michael Gerson: Conservatives make a deal with the devil

Stephen Prothero: Why conservatives start culture wars and liberals win them

Michael Gerson: How should conservative Christians handle a rapidly changing culture?

Barton Swaim is the author of "The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics" and a contributing columnist at The Washington Post.

 

we are talking about some large egos here with the left, they will run amuck get cocky brag and fall on there own swords eventually and bury themselves, just wait for it...

 

For good reason. Nothing ever ends, Adrian. No.

 

Politics is cyclical. Nothing is new under the sun, and history always repeats itself. The current political climate is nothing that hasn't repeated itself over and over again since ancient times.

 

It's already happening dude.

Go check out DePaul University's facebook page, their university online rag, and anything else that has to do with them.

If you think Mizzou has fallen on hard times, that's nothing compared to what's going to happen at DePaul.

 

Maybe these "Devout Christians" could solace their lives and actions by emulating the life of Jesus Christ, doing things like giving to the poor, turning their shirt off their back over to homeless man, turning their turning their cheek instead adding another trillion per year for nukes and cluster bombs to maim civilians and children, and things like that!

If these people were truly interested in "Winning a Cultural War", Jesus Christ has filled a whole book of tips to win such a war, at least in Heaven!

But don't hold your breath for the Baptists or "I Believe In Miracles" or any of the 10% Wonders bring a revival!

 

No. They created Trump, their destructor.

Does our silence on the crimes of Communism explain our silence on the totalitarianism of Islam?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B008BU71BM/?tag=aoshq-20

 

Will they be merciful? What do you mean?

Do you mean the liberals should let "conservatives" continue to discriminate because it is their culture. Should the north have continued to let the southern whites have slaves and lynch blacks because "it was their culture"?

When you win a war, you set the rules... The rules are, you can't discriminate against blacks and gays. And you don't have to believe in any particular religion. And in some places, you can light up joint.

That doesn't mean you have to light up a joint. That doesn't mean you have to change your religion. All the "victory" of the left means, is that "conservatives" can be free to believe and act how they want, just others don't have to agree with them. It is like cigarettes, they are legal, but you don't have to smoke them. Look gay marriage is legal, it doesn't mean conservatives have to start being gay and getting married.

 

The days of a America revolved around Christianity, a family with a father having gelled back hair, a mother working at home, attending Church in Sunday vests with kids named Harry and Sally, those days are dead, and we might as well deal with it.

So we promote looking like drug addicts, long hair, and ripped jeans. What difference does ti make? It's the 21st century look of professionalism.

 

Your author worked for disgraced South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.

 

That's going to be hard to do with conservatives in control of Congress, the White House and appointing the next two SCOTUS judges.

 

considering the fact that the far right wins evry election in europe and an general shift to the far right in europe this thread here sounds like real comedy.

 

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Actually, those days never existed.

 

Sure they did.

Things were very different, and better, before the sixties.

 

From a guy who has a propaganda lie as his picture... So Prof.... what does the "it" in your chosen picture icon stand for? Do you even know?

 

So, what do you see being reversed over the next four years? I mean, Roe v Wade was 43 years ago, and abortion is still legal. Are you suggesting gay marriage and anti-discrimination laws will be changed?

 

Define culture.

 

WHERE do you get that idea from? You really should read some actual BOOKS on history instead of just listening to Rush.

 

I am an eyewitness to that particular history.

What I am interested in is where you get your ideas from. What makes you think your teachers are telling you the truth.

 

That's the Benghazi Consulate burning in the background and one of the attackers doing a dance.

 

I was responding to the above post. As far as roe vs Wade, it won't be reversed. I'm kinda glad about that. Liberals will continue to kill their future voters while real Conservatives won't have abortions. The Conservative population will grow and the liberal population will be aborted into oblivion. That's why the Democrats are so hot for illegals to be made legal and vote for them.

 

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Whatever you say.........
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Hey, Causality Breakdown, is it ok to read, let alone believe, a book written by a Trotskyite?

Has it really come to this?
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So then, you don't know the answer to the question.

Taking quotes out of context to smear people with distortions and outright lies is certainly part of the right wing propaganda playbook. And now we have people chanting these phrases and using them in stupid meme's like this one, and the people repeating and posting don't even know what they mean..... So do you even know what the phrase you chose as you avatar means? What does the "it" in "what difference does it make" refer to?

What are you going to chant next,,,,, "you didn't build that"... Another right wing propaganda chant, that the people chanting it have no idea what "that" is.

 

The cultural war will always go on. Positions of power will change, attention will be redirected and we can lose ground. Progressives must remain vigilant to protect the the things we have won. We won same sex marriage and abortion is under heavy attack. We can secure that then gay marriage will be under attack. Conservatives still fighting the war won't give up and the left is naive if we think they will.


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