Recently in Social Conservatives Category

Dan Gilgoff's got a Q&A with Family Research Council Pooh-bah Tony Perkins, wherein Perkins seems to be giving the Grand Old Party a bit of the back of  his hand, while unclenching his fist in the direction of the Obama administration. No disrespect to Dan, who just asked the questions, but I wouldn't rush to take this at face value. It's pretty much SOP for religious right leaders to rattle the Republican cage whenever they're feeling a bit unloved, and with the election of Michael Steele as head of the RNC, that's just how they're feeling. I'll believe there's something going on when I see signs of it on the relevant websites. And if you take a look at the FRC's, all you'll find is anti-Obamaism, not a peep of anti-Republicanism.

The New Republic has posted a long article by Sam Tanenhaus that purports to be an autopsy of the conservative movement in America, but a good hunk of the corpse lies unexamined. Not to get all Mattingly on you, but there's barely a mention of religion in the entire piece, which seems like an odd omission given that religiosified politics has been the sustaining force in the conservative movement for the past generation. What's Tanenhaus' problem?

The burden of his argument is the old lament that America has never been able to create a real Edmund Burke-style conservativism:

The story of postwar American conservatism is best understood as a continual replay of a single long-standing debate. On one side are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, the restoration of America's pre-welfare state ancien regime. And, time and again, the counterrevolutionaries have won. The result is that modern American conservatism has dedicated itself not to fortifying and replenishing civil society but rather to weakening it through a politics of civil warfare.

Fair enough, but what about the central role Burke ascribed to religion as the ungirding of civil society? Surely any "Burkean" history of postwar conservatism ought to wrestle with that. For while it may be the case, as Tanenhaus notes, that when push came to shove, Russell Kirk et al. abandoned their fine talk of the organic nature of society in favor old-time laissez faire capitalism, still, the continuing kulturkampf over abortion, gay rights, Darwin, stem cell research, etc. have been far from an inconsequential dimension of our national politics. How does all that relate to the tale Tanenhaus tells?

Closest to Burkean conservatism is the conservative Catholic intelligentsia, with its natural law argumentation and its high culture sensibilities. But as a force in the world, it has been far less consequential than neoconservatism, the other intellectual power on the right. It's the evangelicals who really need to be placed in the story--and they're the tertium quid that doesn't fit. For on the one hand, they do carry with them a sense that society requires fixed and eternal moral values in order to function properly. But on the other, their permanent sense of beleagueredness combined with their proselytizing imperative ill suits them to play the establishmentarian role Burke envisaged for religion in society (cf. Rick Warren at the Inaugural). Social Stability, for them, always comes in second to Revival. Bottom line: The Burkean schema cannot reckon with the ebb and flow and evangelicalism in American conservatism.

The barons of the GOP are longing for a new Haley Barbour to head the RNC, writes Alexander Burns on Politico, and on his account what that means is someone consummately competent at the care and feeding of the apparat. Oh to be able to party like it was 1993-97! But it's worth bearing in mind that, in addition to his political skills, the governor of Mississippi is a classic Bourbon conservative in more ways than one. When the state was forced into a round of major belt-tightening a few years ago, the joke was that the only thing that wasn't cut was the governor's Maker's Mark account. So much not a part of the religious right is Barbour that the Democrat who tried to unseat him in 2007 based his campaign on a religious challenge to throw the money changer out of the Temple. (See Charles Wilson's article on the campaign here.)

Meanwhile, James C. McKinley, Jr. reports in today's NYT on the coup in the Texas legislature wherein the autocratic social conservative speaker of the house, Thomas Craddick, has been supplanted by Joe Straus, a pro-choice Jew from San Antonio who voted against legislation to ban gay men and lesbians from serving as foster parents. That's Texas Republicanism?

To be sure, when it comes to party leadership posts, ideology generally takes a back seat to more practical considerations. But it's hard to avoid the suspicion that a lot of Republican insiders are trying to find a way to lower the party's social conservative profile. What they understand is this: It's the geography, stupid. For the GOP, "social conservatives" means "white evangelicals," and white evangelicals are distributed highly unevenly around the country. In 2008, they were insufficient to hold those linchpins of GOP national success, Florida, Virginia, and Ohio. Any effort to rebuild the party has to look to capturing states outside the evangelical heartland, and that means being able to appeal to "social moderates"--pro-choice suburbanites who have no particular problem with gay marriage. And that means having party leaders who are not hamstrung by "moral values."

As noted in this space, a few days ago Religion Dispatches ran a piece by Sarah Posner taking a mildly dyspeptic look a what has somewhat nastily (and hyperbolically) been termed the "Religious Industrial Complex" (RIC), by which is meant the small agglomeration of people and institutions that have sprung up over the past several years to help the Democratic Party reach out to--and, of course, round up--people of faith, values voters, social conservatives, those people, or whatever else you'd like to call them.

The burden of Posner's critique was that the RIC has helped shaped a media narrative suggesting (wrongly) that there is some kind of new evangelical left out there dedicated to a broad agenda and led by the likes of Rick Warren and Joel Hunter. Her point is that these evangelical leaders are not who they're made out to be, that RIC has sold its progressive religious birthright for a mess of conservative pottage that, in the end, had precious little electorally to show for it.

Yesterday, under the byline "Katie Paris and the Faith in Public Life Team," one of the charter members of the RIC (and a nicer bunch of folks you'd never want to meet) responded, insisting a bit defensively that its approach has too gotten results and that in any event it's a good thing for progressives to seek common ground with conservatives. To which Pastordan retorted in an extended post that the efforts of Faith in Public Life et al. amount to less than meets the eye. Paraphrasing Jesus, he demands, "Show me the math."

Actually, there is a bit of math on the RIC's side. Much to the surprise of a number of observers (including this one), Obama ended up picking up some significant support among evangelicals, especially those at the younger end of the age scale--just the cohort that voted overwhelmingly for George Bush in 2004. Of course, it's open to debate how much the RIC's efforts contributed to that result. My sense is that the tectonic plate of American evangelicalism is indeed shifting, and that the efforts of (let's call them) center-right evangelical leaders to expand their agenda has legitimated the shift. That's why the old bulls of the evangelical right have gotten so hysterical about them.

That said, there's little question that the RIC and its journalistic proponents (Amy Sullivan, E.J. Dionne) have sometimes let wishful thinking run away with sober judgment, hopefully announcing the evangel of what has not (yet?) come to pass. The problem here is not with the RIC, which is simply going about the traditional political business of grabbing for folks in the middle of the road and spinning the results. Sticking strictly to your prophetic guns, as Pastordan urges, amounts to a lefty version of the Rovian strategy of playing to the base. (Sorry, Dan.)

The real difficulty is with the journalistic narrative. At this point in time, the GOP has much more of a problem with the less religious than the Democrats have with the more religious. And the less religious are rather more numerous these days than the more religious. So while it may make good sense for partisan Democrats to push for a bigger piece of the religious pie, the real story for the next cycle is how Republicans reach beyond their "social conservative" base. And as of now, there's no Secular Industrial Complex to show them the way.

Update: Response of Sarah Posner to an initial response of mine.

Contemplating the prospects of secular conservatism in the GOP, Andrew Sullivan writes, "I don't see how Republicanism, as it is now constructed, can tolerate atheists in its midst." Clearly, the atheists and other unaffiliated types have gotten the message. Since 2000, the unaffiliated are the only religious grouping that has grown steadily more Democratic in its voting preferences, choosing Gore over Bush 61-30, Kerry over Bush 67-31, and Obama over McCain 75-23. This time around, for the first time, the unaffiliated preferred the Democrat by a larger margin than white evangelicals preferred the Republican.

The debate over the role of social conservatives in the Republican Party of the Future proceeds apace. Today brings Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News, writing USA Today's Monday "On Religion" column, to the effect that the GOP cannot do without 'em. Dreher takes as his text to oppose Jeffrey Hart's anti-evangelical screed in The Beast, wherein the old conservative lion calls for jettisoning the connection with evangelical Protestantism that has characterized the party since the 1980 election. Here's the Hart gauntlet:

The lethal problem for Republicans is that while religion of a particular kind is central to their party today, it is also toxic to moderate, independent, suburban, young and, more inclusively, educated voters.

To the contrary, saith Dreher:

John McCain didn't get his clock cleaned because of his ardent advocacy for unborn life or his stout defense of traditional marriage — neither of which played anything but a bit part in the tragicomic McCain-Palin campaign.

No, McCain lost because the economy is collapsing on the watch of an unpopular Republican president, and he had no idea what to say about it. McCain lost because his party is incompetent. McCain lost because his choice of Sarah the Unready cast doubt about his judgment. And McCain lost because Barack Obama ran a great campaign.

Where is Jesus in any of that?

This is an empirical question that is actually not so easy to answer. Ask voters why they voted the way they did, and they cite the economy and Bush and things other than the GOP's prevailing religiosity. But there are also reasons to suppose that Hart knows something that such empirical evidence does not disclose. Such as that Americans generally, and the old heartland suburban Republicans he's talking about in particular, don't share evangelical views on abortion, stem cell research, gay rights, etc. And that the public now wants less rather than more influence of religion in public life. Rather than argue the point, however, I'd ask the Drehers of the world to assume for the sake of argument that Hart is right. What recommendations would they have then?

My guess is that they wouldn't have any. For at bottom, their interest is not in answering the empirical question but in making a case for grounding the future of Republicanism in religious values--call it social conservatism if you like. The argument is that once you've got the little world of the family set in order, the big world of economic and foreign policy will be just fine. A somewhat rococo version of it can be found on the First Things blog, wherein R.R. Reno claims that the Obama coalition voted out of insecurity--economic and international--and that the way to allay the anxiety is to establish stability among the Lares and Penates. ("Divorce and serial cohabitation bring fluidity and change into the most ancient touchstone of permanence: home and hearth....We can endure the inevitable risks of marketplace and battlefield—but only if we have some confidence about the stability of the deeper, more fundamental things of life.")

This is the "gay marriage undermines heterosexual marriage" argument writ large, and no more convincing for being so. Journey with me, for a moment, back to those happy, stable 1930s, when divorce was difficult, serial cohabitation rare, abortion forbidden, and gay marriage undreamed-of. God might have been in his heaven but all was not right with the world. Was it stable domesticity that made economic collapse and world war endurable? Nope. It was addressing marketplace and battlefield "risks" directly that made domestic bliss possible.