In case you haven’t heard, controversial Supreme Court decisions are causing dangerous divisions in the United States of America.
Yes, I know. If you’re old enough you have been hearing people say that since 1973. And there is, of course, an element of truth in these statements, then and now. SCOTUS has become the only branch of government that matters when it comes to forcing one half of America to accept the legal, cultural and moral changes sought by the other half. Study several decades worth of presidential elections.
However, when it comes to mainstream media coverage, not all controversial Supreme Court decisions are created equal. If you have followed Twitter since the fall of Roe v. Wade, you know that large numbers of professionals in major newsrooms are freaking out.
Is this “new” news or old news? Truth is, arguments about red America (“Jesusland”) and blue America (“The United States of Canada”) have been getting louder and louder for several decades. This was the topic that dominated (once again) this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), which focused on this Ronald Brownstein essay at The Atlantic: “America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good.”
What’s interesting about this piece is that it says America’s divisions have nothing to do with traditional forms of religion, culture, the First Amendment or the U.S. Constitution (especially Federalism). No, this is a war about racism, period. SCOTUS has been seized by the enemies of reason and freedom and, thus, America’s future is at risk. This is a concept with serious implications for news coverage.
IT MAY BE TIME to stop talking about “red” and “blue” America. That’s the provocative conclusion of Michael Podhorzer, a longtime political strategist for labor unions and the chair of the Analyst Institute, a collaborative of progressive groups that studies elections. In a private newsletter that he writes for a small group of activists, Podhorzer recently laid out a detailed case for thinking of the two blocs as fundamentally different nations uneasily sharing the same geographic space.
“When we think about the United States, we make the essential error of imagining it as a single nation, a marbled mix of Red and Blue people,” Podhorzer writes. “But in truth, we have never been one nation. We are more like a federated republic of two nations: Blue Nation and Red Nation. This is not a metaphor; it is a geographic and historical reality.”
The bottom line:
To Podhorzer, the growing divisions between red and blue states represent a reversion to the lines of separation through much of the nation’s history. The differences among states in the Donald Trump era, he writes, are “very similar, both geographically and culturally, to the divides between the Union and the Confederacy. And those dividing lines were largely set at the nation’s founding, when slave states and free states forged an uneasy alliance to become ‘one nation.’ ”
The Trump era? The familiar maps of red vs. blue America — focusing on states, counties or even zip codes — have been popular in social media since George W. Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000.
The Big Idea here is that blue America is based on rising levels of education and economic development, while red America has historically been packed with sad, envious people who want to prevent oppressed groups from achieving true equity and/or equality. Readers need to read the whole piece to see the economic factors at work, although I would say that more attention could have been given to tech and industrial folks heading from California, New York, etc., to Texas, Florida and Tennessee (and not just to blue urban zones).
But let’s end with that Big Idea, once again.
The increasing divergence — and antagonism — between the red nation and the blue nation is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America. That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th century, when the basic trend was toward greater convergence.
One element of that convergence came through what legal scholars call the “rights revolution.” That was the succession of actions from Congress and the Supreme Court, mostly beginning in the 1960s, that strengthened the floor of nationwide rights and reduced the ability of states to curtail those rights. (Key moments in that revolution included the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and the Supreme Court decisions striking down state bans on contraception, interracial marriage, abortion, and, much later, prohibitions against same-sex intimate relations and marriage.)
Wait for it. Here comes the Big Image:
The flurry of socially conservative laws that red states have passed since 2021, on issues such as abortion; classroom discussions of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and LGBTQ rights, is widening this split. No Democratic-controlled state has passed any of those measures. Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist, told me that the experience of Jim Crow segregation offers an important reference point for understanding how far red states might take this movement to roll back civil rights and liberties — not that they literally would seek to restore segregation, but that they are comfortable with “a time when states” had laws so “entirely different” that they created a form of domestic apartheid.
Please allow me to add a few more moderate voices to this discussion and to this, well, divided we fall timeline. Faithful GetReligion readers will recognize these voices as thinkers who have long influenced my work on this website and in academia.
First, let’s back up to 1992 or thereabouts and the book “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America” by James Davison Hunter. Here is a chunk (once again) of my 10th anniversary “On Religion” column in 1998:
… In 1986, a sociologist of religion had an epiphany while serving as a witness in a church-state case in Mobile, Ala. The question was whether "secular humanism" had evolved into a state-mandated religion, leading to discrimination against traditional "Judeo-Christian" believers. …
"I realized something there in that courtroom. We were witnessing a fundamental realignment in American religious pluralism," said James Davison Hunter of the University of Virginia. "Divisions that were deeply rooted in our civilization were disappearing, divisions that had for generations caused religious animosity, prejudice and even warfare. It was mind- blowing. The ground was moving."
The old dividing lines centered on issues such as the person of Jesus Christ, church tradition and the Protestant Reformation. But these new interfaith coalitions were fighting about something even more basic — the nature of truth and moral authority.
Here is another image of the great divide, as discussed in this new podcast:
… America now contains two basic worldviews, which he called "orthodox" and "progressive." The orthodox believe it's possible to follow transcendent, revealed truths. Progressives disagree and put their trust in personal experience, even if that requires them to "resymbolize historic faiths according to the prevailing assumptions of contemporary life."
Now, let’s turn to journalist and professor Thomas B. Edsall, who currently writes for the New York Times. But here, once again, is a crucial chunk of his “Blue Movie” essay for, yes, The Atlantic. It describes a “morality gap” that has become the crucial wedge in American politics.
Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.
Respondents who took the "liberal" stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a "conservative" stand on three or more of the questions. (Someone taking the liberal position, as pollsters define it, dismisses the idea that homosexuality is morally wrong, admits to looking at pornography, doesn't look down on a married person having an affair, regards sex before marriage as morally acceptable, and views religion as not a very important part of daily life.) According to Morris and Penn, these questions were better vote predictors — and better indicators of partisan inclination — than anything else except party affiliation or the race of the voter. …
Yes, this is old news.
However, Edsall, hardly a man of the right, has returned to related themes over and over in the past two decades. Here are some New York Times essays worth reading:
* “America, We Have a Problem: The rise of ‘political sectarianism’ is putting us all in danger. “
* “Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals. Discuss.”
* “How Much Does How Much We Hate Each Other Matter?”
Just this week, Edsall wrote a new piece — post Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — with this striking headline: “Democrats Are Having a Purity-Test Problem at Exactly the Wrong Time.”
“Purity” language?
Yes, the big idea is that many groups on what used to be called the left are now facing painful clashes between, well, old liberals who believe in compromise and tolerance (even with those they believe are intolerant) and young “progressives” who believe that the absolute truths in their hearts and minds must dominate American life and laws — or else. Here is a crucial passage:
One high-ranking nonprofit official who has been in the middle of these battles, but who declined to be identified because of the repercussions he would face within his organization, commented by email:
“Difficulties addressing D.E.I. issues and identity politics are part of the problem, but they are symptoms as much as causes. There’s a new perfectionism in our organizations that gets in the way of actually dealing with challenges in our imperfect world.”
The fundamental problem, he wrote, is “the presence in every progressive organization of a small but very vocal fringe that views every problem as a sin.”
Yes, the key word there is “sin.” What we have here is a new “culture wars” divide — with strong claims of absolute truths — inside the institutions of what Hunter called the camp of the progressives. Ask J.K. “Harry Potter” Rowling about this trend.
Finally, let’s turn to the increasingly prophetic 2020 book “Divided We Fall” by that noted cultural conservative, and obviously #NeverTrump hero, Harvard Law First Amendment specialist David French of The Dispatch.
This rather overlooked book is built, in large part, by two fictional (#LOL) parables about secession threats linked to controversial SCOTUS decisions about — you guessed it — Roe v. Wade and also gun control. One is “Texit” and the other is “Calexit.” Let’s walk through a bit of my column about that book:
America's new civil war begins with the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, creating an abortion-free zone in the Bible Belt and most heartland states.
Enraged Democrats pledge to end the U.S. Senate filibuster and expand the number of high-court justices. After restoring Roe, they seek single-payer health care, strict gun control and sweeping changes in how government agencies approach the First Amendment, with the IRS warning faith groups to evolve – or else – on matters of sexual identity. Big Tech begins enforcing the new orthodoxy.
Conservatives rebel and liberals soon realize that most of America's military, including nuclear weapons, are in rebel territory. Then federal agents kill Alabama's pro-life, Black governor – while trying to arrest him as a traitor. That's too much for Gov. Francisco Gonzalez of Texas, who decides that it's time for a new republic.
Thus, the book opens with this ominous language:
"It's time for Americans to wake up to a fundamental reality: the continued unity of the United States cannot be guaranteed," wrote French. Right now, "there is not a single important cultural, religious, political, or social force that is pulling Americans together more than it is pulling us apart."
Americans are divided by their choices in news and popular culture. America remains the developing world's most religious nation, yet its increasingly secularized elites occupy one set of zip codes, while most traditional religious believers live in another. In politics, more and more Democrats are Democrats simply because they hate Republicans, and vice versa.
Alas, the realities fueling bitter divisions inside America are not new, they are quite old.
The implications for journalists — especially those covering religion, law, arts, politics and even economics (dare I say sports) — are obvious. Just saying.
Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it along to others.
FIRST IMAGE: Uncredited illustration with Dictionary.com feature entitled “Why Do We Have ‘Red States’ And ‘Blue States’ ”?