You just need to keep fighting.
Nov. 13th, 2005 11:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jlhIn answering ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wordplay's recent post about the election my comment got so long it needed a post of its own.
wordplay: The thing about post-evangelism is that I'm really not sure it's the kind of thing that just dies off and goes away. I mean, if you've decided that your way is God's way and you have a unique and singular understanding of that, can you back off from that position? You're the historian; how do these periods end?
Two notes: I am, of course, not an historian yet, but just a first-year grad student displaying that "a little learning is a dangerous thing." Worry not; I plan in drinking deep in the Pierian spring, I just need a little more time to do it.
Second, much of what I'm talking about can be found in Mark Noll's America's God and Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy, both of which are excellent.
There have been a few waves of evangelism in American religion, not all of which gained enough traction to affect politics. But the wave of the early 1800s—the one you may know from your no-doubt AP American History class as the Second Great Enlightenment—definitely did. It brought everything we think of as fundamentalism: personal relationship with God, reading the bible for yourself, and most importantly, that literal interpretation of the bible.
Thing is, if one agrees to a literal interpretation of the bible, one cannot have a theological argument against slavery. The Methodists and the Baptists split over this issue. Northerners felt that it was morally wrong but they couldn't prove it within the church. And then they did what you do when you can't win a public argument: they changed the terms. The hard-core abolitionists realized that they couldn't avoid politics but had to actually enter the political arena in order to further their aims.
The other thing they did was to take the argument out of the church and make it a more general moral argument, an enlightened citizens argument. And, in the end, they won, though you know, it took a while because economics and theology were against them.
So what we can learn from this is that, and I know that this gets talked about all the time, the right is dictating the terms of discourse, and so long as they do that, they will continue to win the "argument". Clinton's genius was that he knew how to work within the terms of that argument and still win which is why the right hates him so much; he's not supposed to be able to do that! What the left has to do now is find ways to frame their argument externally that are very different from the way they talk now. They need to talk about values, and God, because both are important to Americans, instead of wishing that Americans didn't care about values and God, or that Americans are sort of dumb and backward for caring about values and God. You can't win an argument by telling someone that they're stupid; it just pisses them off.
I think there is an undercurrent now of framing the beliefs of the left in terms of even family values, of taking that phrase "back". Gay families, importantly, are being normalized. Look at the polling data in MA—since the passage of gay marriage the number of people who are against it has steadily declined. The problem with the way that the fundamentalists talk is that they tend to be rather hysterical and millennial in their rhetoric—as Nixon recognized in 68, fear is an incredibly strong motivator. But if the sky doesn't actually fall, then Americans tend to go back to their libertarian roots.
It's sort of like the Big Lie of totalitarianism. The southern slave owners said that slavery was good for the Negro—that whole paternalist rendering of slavery. But that argument could not stand up to Frederick Douglass talking about how he had a pretty good master, in a moderate state like MD, and slavery was still horrible, so who knows what those poor slaves in SC are undergoing. And once you really know and believe that, you can't believe any of the other stuff the slave owners were saying, either. I mean, most of those southern states, in the 1850s, were outlawing the circulation of abolitionist tracts and of critiques of the slave society like The Impending Crisis of the South and you know your society is on the rails when you're banning books, when information itself is damaging to it.
Or, as Auden said, "All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie".
wordplay's recent post about the election my comment got so long it needed a post of its own.wordplay: The thing about post-evangelism is that I'm really not sure it's the kind of thing that just dies off and goes away. I mean, if you've decided that your way is God's way and you have a unique and singular understanding of that, can you back off from that position? You're the historian; how do these periods end?Two notes: I am, of course, not an historian yet, but just a first-year grad student displaying that "a little learning is a dangerous thing." Worry not; I plan in drinking deep in the Pierian spring, I just need a little more time to do it.
Second, much of what I'm talking about can be found in Mark Noll's America's God and Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy, both of which are excellent.
There have been a few waves of evangelism in American religion, not all of which gained enough traction to affect politics. But the wave of the early 1800s—the one you may know from your no-doubt AP American History class as the Second Great Enlightenment—definitely did. It brought everything we think of as fundamentalism: personal relationship with God, reading the bible for yourself, and most importantly, that literal interpretation of the bible.
Thing is, if one agrees to a literal interpretation of the bible, one cannot have a theological argument against slavery. The Methodists and the Baptists split over this issue. Northerners felt that it was morally wrong but they couldn't prove it within the church. And then they did what you do when you can't win a public argument: they changed the terms. The hard-core abolitionists realized that they couldn't avoid politics but had to actually enter the political arena in order to further their aims.
The other thing they did was to take the argument out of the church and make it a more general moral argument, an enlightened citizens argument. And, in the end, they won, though you know, it took a while because economics and theology were against them.
So what we can learn from this is that, and I know that this gets talked about all the time, the right is dictating the terms of discourse, and so long as they do that, they will continue to win the "argument". Clinton's genius was that he knew how to work within the terms of that argument and still win which is why the right hates him so much; he's not supposed to be able to do that! What the left has to do now is find ways to frame their argument externally that are very different from the way they talk now. They need to talk about values, and God, because both are important to Americans, instead of wishing that Americans didn't care about values and God, or that Americans are sort of dumb and backward for caring about values and God. You can't win an argument by telling someone that they're stupid; it just pisses them off.
I think there is an undercurrent now of framing the beliefs of the left in terms of even family values, of taking that phrase "back". Gay families, importantly, are being normalized. Look at the polling data in MA—since the passage of gay marriage the number of people who are against it has steadily declined. The problem with the way that the fundamentalists talk is that they tend to be rather hysterical and millennial in their rhetoric—as Nixon recognized in 68, fear is an incredibly strong motivator. But if the sky doesn't actually fall, then Americans tend to go back to their libertarian roots.
It's sort of like the Big Lie of totalitarianism. The southern slave owners said that slavery was good for the Negro—that whole paternalist rendering of slavery. But that argument could not stand up to Frederick Douglass talking about how he had a pretty good master, in a moderate state like MD, and slavery was still horrible, so who knows what those poor slaves in SC are undergoing. And once you really know and believe that, you can't believe any of the other stuff the slave owners were saying, either. I mean, most of those southern states, in the 1850s, were outlawing the circulation of abolitionist tracts and of critiques of the slave society like The Impending Crisis of the South and you know your society is on the rails when you're banning books, when information itself is damaging to it.
Or, as Auden said, "All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie".
