Religious War Hits America

Protesters at Albany State University of New York, while shutting down a conservative free speech event during Holy Week, trashed and discarded one attendee’s Bible (see above).

To me, religion explains today’s split America. Look at Democratic-backed candidate Janet Protaswiecz's April 4 Wisconsin state Supreme Court election victory. It shows abortion’s enduring power in the aftermath of last Summer’s Roe v. Wade's reversal. 

Protasiewicz defeated her conservative opponent by 11%. The Democrat’s ads pounded home her backing for abortion, an unusual tactic in a judicial election. Protasiewicz’s win gives Wisconsin progressive justices a 4-3 majority, enough to overturn the state's 174-year-old total abortion ban — restored once Roe v. Wade was gone.

Earlier, this blog identified Roe v. Wade’s end as the reason Republicans so underperformed last November. “Right to Choose,” important to conservatives on most issues, on abortion works for progressives.

Choice prevailed last year in conservative Kansas, a state Trump won twice by double-digits. In swing-state Michigan, abortion helped Democrats win all statewide offices and retake the state Legislature for the first time in decades. 

The midterms underlined the power of childless unmarried women. Married men, married women, and unmarried men all supported the GOP, but an overwhelming 68% of unmarried women voted Democratic.

In December 2021, before Roe v. Wade went down, the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin wrote: 

Heart be still, but America is in the early stages of what could be a major political shift. On issue after issue, from soaring crime to inflation to critical race theory, Democrats and the far left are being forced to play defense because their radical policies are failing. The effort to reshape the nation is clashing with reality — and reality is winning.

Then came election day, 2022. 

Abortion involves religion, with its differing approaches to “thou shall not kill.” The issue sets unmarried women and others against traditional morality.

Last year’s exit polls showed about two-thirds of the 31% of voters who attend religious services on a weekly basis voted Republican. About two-thirds of the 30% who never attend religious services voted Democratic. Republicans won by 7% or more among married men, married women, and single men. Democrats won by 37% among single women.

“It’s not important what religion I believe in, it’s important what America I believe in,” says Nancy Pelosi (“Varney & Company,” FOX 11:36 a.m. ET, 4/6/23). Pelosi’s America worships a new religion, not Christianity.

Sasha Stone tells us: 

2008 was .    .   .  the historic election of the nation’s first Black President, Barack Obama. That would spark not just a movement, but a full-blown religion that would influence American culture in ways not felt on the Left since JFK [f]or a community that was already trying to [reach] self-improvement with the rise of therapy and anti-depressants.  (emphasis added). Oprah [helped us] understand the difference between “good” people and “bad” people. We were already on the path towards perfecting our new utopia even before Obama rose to power, but once he did, the utopians had [their] religious figure.

This blog earlier quoted conservative researcher Lee Siegel:

In the eyes of the liberal media, which [stirs up] long-settled moral struggles as if they were still living injustices, the Middle Ages beckon whenever prayer hovers near the public realm. Institutionalized religion moved to the periphery of American culture and society decades ago; it no longer has the power to harm or exclude. 

And long before Siegel, G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) observed that “when man ceases to believe in Christianity, the result is not that he is likely to believe in nothing, but rather that he will believe in anything.”

One such religious strain is monomania, or obsessive enthusiasm for or preoccupation with one thing, which Anthony Daniels discusses in City Journal:

the death of God .    .   . has not lessened our desire for an overall or transcendent meaning or purpose in our lives[, for] an overarching system of thought that simultaneously explains the woes of the world and suggests a means to eliminate them, [giving one] a cause .   .   . larger than himself. If you have the right opinions you are good; if you have the wrong ones you are bad. [D]oubt is treachery and nuance [allows] bad opinions [to] comeback.   .   . Where opinion is virtue, disagreement amounts to [vice;] “silence is violence.”

For monomaniacs,  opinion, not conduct, becomes virtue. Life for most used to be extremely tough; no treatment for most illnesses, existence hanging by a thread. The life expectancy of the royal family in mid-19th century Britain averaged 45 years. But in today’s world of opinions, words are poison, and one gains moral standing by sifting others’ words for wickedness.

Virtue’s liberation—from restraint on personal conduct—is for the persons with the right opinions; control is over the rest of society. The intelligentsia is an aristocracy, but lacks the good taste, Daniels posits, that once justified aristocratic rule.

Daniel McCarthy believes many in the progressive coalition are vexed by the wide gap between their status and that of the voters they use. Highly educated, career-oriented, nonreligious women prosper, but the available pool of even wealthier, higher-status men shrinks. And since men tend to value looks over social status or wealth, even successfully married middle-aged career women may find their high-status husbands ready for a new wife.

Protected progressive elites treat crime-ridden neighborhoods as victims of guns and Republican racism, not of insufficient policing and poor parental discipline. The Democratic coalition’s churches in fact are as nontraditional as their secular counterparts.

To McCarthy, what binds the odd coalition together is “immense and tutelary power.” The state provides new social esteem (same-sex marriage, for example) and employs power over education to transfer responsibility for personal unhappiness from unhappy to “unfair.” The coalition’s emotional glue is resentment of Republicans, to be overcome by a centralized state, near-monopoly tech firms, and legacy media.

Batya Ungar-Sargon argues that democracy requires sharing power, “tied to shared economic success, to upward mobility and to the middle class.” With no middle-class, political power rests with elites, “as they like it.” And progressives “don’t believe in cars, they don’t believe in trucks, they don’t believe in farming.” They don’t care for the jobs needed to survive. They’ve “given up on America,” hating its “conservatives, religious people, Republicans [—] anathema to the good life.” They outsource “the dirty jobs to China” with its dirty gasses.

The coalition’s wealthy, its unmarried women, its blacks (25% of the party vote) and other minorities including LGBTQIA, its government unions and young people, holds power even as the non-college, working class voters that used to be the party’s heart depart, even as progressive leaders fail to tackle inflation, to provide energy resources, to secure peace abroad, to protect people from crime or criminals and fentanyl crossing our borders, to clean up cities, to house the homeless. They fail as effective leaders. Instead, progressives worship Climate Change. This anti-capitalist faith has displaced traditional morality.

Last Fall’s midterm election was historically close, the first time since the popular election of senators began in 1914 that neither party held more than 52% of governorships, House seats, or Senate seats.

The coalition works, helped by its own religion.