By Samuel Damren
With the recent political season over, but re-gathering for 2024, the “conventional narratives” underlying political wedge issues deserve re-examination.
One conventional narrative is that America’s repeating culture wars are tied to the belief that we keep fighting the same fights that our parents, their parents, and their parents fought.
In 1991, sociologist James Hunter’s book, “Culture Wars,” introduced the phrase to the political discourse. Hunter did not invent the term, but it has since become a well-worn talking point for politicians, commentators, and in the press.
The term applies to the category of conflicts that pit so-called traditional values, primarily focused on religion and race, against the intrusion of competing morals of a contemporary age. The conventional narrative is that the discord re-circulates because underlying conflicts are never fully addressed and resolved.
For example, under this analysis, today’s revved up MAGA Republicans are portrayed as an iteration of the same anti-immigrant, racist, religious fervor that occurred in 1920s when Fundamentalist Protestants violently rejected the modernity and scandalous morals of the Jazz Age.
In the 1920s, the “Great White Army” was the Ku Klux Klan who counted among their five-million members, thousands of Christian ministers and innumerable politicians. In 1924, the Klan candidate for mayor of Detroit, then the fourth largest city in the country, lost by only a few hundred votes.
Virulent rhetoric against Catholics, Jews, African-Americans, and immigrants was commonplace. When expressed by leaders or at public rallies, it was punctuated by Klan violence aimed at individuals and on occasion more wide spread violence, such as the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre where several hundred African-Americans were killed and homes and businesses destroyed by a white mob.
Parallels can be drawn between these events and conflicts in other eras, but the supposition that we are as constrained today as we were in the past to repeat this history is open to question.
The supposition relies on assumptions that the races will remain separate from one another across succeeding generations and that people of faith will remain true to the religious affiliation of their parents. Over the long run of American history, the assumptions proved well founded.
However, they are no longer. Why do I say that? Demographics.
The late Peter Drucker was a highly regarded academician, educator, and to some a sage. One of his notable observations to executives involved in business planning was to pay special attention “to the future that has already happened.”
For Drucker, the future that has “already happened” is foretold in demographics. Through the decisions and values of the rising generation in a society, trends and likely trajectories become not only visible, but also predictable.
What does this have to do with the conventional narrative regarding religious intolerance, racial prejudice, and its supposed static constant in the American body politic?
Unlike prior generations, the values of many in today’s rising generation are markedly different. Inter-racial marriage among “baby boomers” was rare and illegal in many states until 1967. Marriage between persons of different religious affiliation or those who were not religious was less rare, but still uncommon.
That is not the case with the children of baby boomers.
As revealed in recent U.S. Census data, inter-racial marriage and marriage between persons of different beliefs is not simply more accepted today, it is practiced in significant numbers. This generational break should not be underestimated.
According to the Pew Research Center, intermarriage between newlyweds of different races rose from 3% in 1967 to 19% in 2019. These couples do not view race as the cultural barrier it once was. From birth, their children will never see skin color as a defining characteristic to family.
In 1960, 81 percent of recently married couples shared the same religion. By 2014, the percentage dropped to 61 percent and that downward trajectory continues.
These big changes are not simply a reflection of increased tolerance by significant numbers of individuals in the rising generation, but reflect their rejection of the conventional narrative that in America race and religion define whom you love and with whom you can choose to make a life.
Much of the “blow back” from those on the “wrong side” of this future history is projected on the LGBTQ community, which, as a recent focus of personal liberties, is the more vulnerable target for present-day prejudice and religious intolerance.
However, if we pay special attention to the “future that has already happened,” we may be witness to the beginning of the end of the repetition of cruel and shameful chapters of American history in which race and religious denomination drew boundaries on the composition of family.
Either that, or MAGA Republicans will don hooded white sheets and carry fiery crosses to the 2025 insurrection at the Capitol.
This commentary is part of a series on conventional narratives.
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