The previous post presented evidence that over the last generation or two Americans have moved leftward on a wide front of social and cultural issues from marriage and manliness to race and language. Alarmed, conservatives have sprung to arms and are vigorously prosecuting a culture war.
This follow-up post presents a specific example. It was sparked by Margaret Talbot’s recent New Yorker article on new Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Talbot’s piece illustrates both the impetus for the right’s political mobilization and its likely futility.
Anxiety
Talbot reports on the debate over whether Barrett’s religion should have been a factor in her confirmation; Barrett is a devout Catholic and a member of a Charismatic Catholic community. Barrett and other Republican appointees to the bench, including the late Antonin Scalia, for whom Barrett clerked, have focused on religious issues, including but going much beyond abortion to matters such as prayer in school, freedom to hire employees based on faith, and more. These justices see their faith as under assault.
Talbot writes:
Though conservative Justices now dominate the Court, it is striking how firmly they hold to the notion of themselves as persecuted figures in a hostile America. [Justice] Alito … gave a speech to the Federalist Society in which he warned that “in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right.” …. The America of 2022 is quite plainly not a country where citizen’s ability to worship freely is in jeopardy…. Yet the conservative Justices often act as if they were alone in a broken elevator, jabbing at the emergency button and hollering for help.
There is a “moral panic” on the right. Social conservatives–distinct from libertarian conservatives–see American society as falling apart, collapsing mainly because traditional organized religion is foundering, and it is foundering because of assaults by “secular forces” in popular culture, universities, tech companies, news media, government, and so on.
In a post of February 2020, I discussed a speech that Trump’s last Attorney General, William Barr, gave at Notre Dame. Barr is a soul mate of the new Justices and Notre Dame is both Justice Barrett’s alma mater and her recent employer. AG Barr argued that “virtually every measure of social pathology” was rising in America, that it was rising because of unloosened licentiousness, that the unloosening was caused by an erosion of faith, and, finally, that the erosion of faith was the result of a purposeful assault on religion by organized secularism. Virtually every assertion that Barr made about the state and direction of America society was factually wrong. But what matters here is the moral panic manifest in Barr’s speech and, it appears, in the thinking of most Supreme Court Justices. This moral panic justifies forceful efforts to defend religion in the courts and presumably thus save the nation.
Self-Defeating
Their anxiety about “religious liberty” is probably rooted less in the social problems that Barr warned about—many of which, like violent crime and teen sex, have been in long-term decline for decades—than in religious disaffiliation itself. As is well-known by now, the proportion of Americans who claim no religious identification has been growing strongly since 1990 (see, e.g., here, here, and here). Perhaps most worrisome to religious conservatives is that fundamentalism, once on the ascent, is now in decline.
The graph below uses General Social Survey data, 1972 to 2018, to show the proportion of all Americans (the blue line) and the proportion of young Americans (under 40; the red line) who identified as members of fundamentalist Protestant denominations. (Unfortunately, the GSS classified all Catholics as being in a “moderate” denomination, but we know that Catholics come in flavors as well, with individuals like Barr and Barrett clearly in the Church’s fundamentalist wing.) The graph shows how fundamentalist affiliations rose from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s but then declined rapidly into the late 2010s. The falling off was even steeper among young Americans. (A sharp-eyed viewer might note a little upsurge in 2016, but that was due to a technical adjustment.)
The post-1990 decline was largely driven by fewer Americans claiming to be Protestants. But even among the Protestants, those in fundamentalist denominations, after expanding from 45% of adherents in early 1970s to 56% at the end of the 1990s, declined to 50% in 2016-18.
Similarly, PRRI reports a drop since 2006 in the percent of Whites who identified as Protestant evangelicals, from 23 to 14.
Fundamentalism’s upsurge about 30 to 50 years ago coincided with Justice Barrett’s first 20 years of life, a peiod when she was immersed in that fundamentalist version of Catholicism. The subsequent sharp decline in fundamentalist affiliations coincides with Barrett’s legal education at Notre Dame and her subsequent legal career. Strong versions of Christianity seemed to be on the march when she was growing up but fading now for about a quarter-century.
How does one explain this decline in religious adherence and especially in fundamentalism? If the explanation is assaults on religion by organized secularists ranging from late-night comedians to government bureaucrats, then a pugnacious counterattack makes some sense. But if fundamentalism’s decline in large measure expresses, as Mike Hout and I have suggested, Americans’ revulsion at religion becoming a politicized tool of social conservatism, then the combative Barr and Alito strategy is actually counterproductive. Their strategy reinforces the growing view that organized religion is just reactionary ideology in vestments.
Conservative legal figures’ agitated response to trends in religion illustrates what is happening also in school boards, state legislatures, and even the streets: the right is aggressively trying to repel the leftward cultural tide.
MADE IN AMERICA 