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Many of the cultural skirmishes Mr. Hunter started writing about in the 1990s remain at the center of politics, including abortion, campus speech codes, multiculturalism, and religions place in public life. And as he warned they might, the disputes have grown more vituperativethrough Clinton hatred, through Bush hatred, through Obama hatred and through every Supreme Court opening.

Thats because culture is not a marginal concern, as many educated people profess to believeeven as they often espouse their own dogmatic cultural positions. Rather, culture is about systems of meaning that help make sense of the world, Mr. Hunter says, why things are good, true and beautiful, or why things are not. Why things are right and wrong. Culture provides the moral foundation of a political order.

Amen to that. When people complain about the culture wars as a phony conflict ginned up by their opponents, it almost always means that they wish their opponents would just shut up and agree with them. Liberal Thomas Franks book Whats The Matter With Kansas? wondered why it was that ordinary Kansans voted for Republicans and against their perceived economic interest. His thesis was that they were being baited by fake culture war issues. This is only true if you believe that economics ought to matter more than culture, and/or if you believe that there are no good-faith reasons to hold conservative views on culture war issues. Frankly, whether they are on the left or the right, I admire someone whose cultural values matter more to them than material advantage.

In this interview, Hunter says that conservatives may have a culture war advantage in government, but have badly lost elsewhere. To use a Marxist term, liberals control the major means of cultural production (the news and entertainment industries, the academy, etc.).

Because liberals control the credentialing institutions of our society, he says, those who want to get to a middle or upper middle class life are going to have to kowtow to liberal culture a culture that likes to think of itself as open, but which is as closed as any other. Hunter:So the Harvard Law School prides itself on its diversity, but its a diversity in which basically everyone views the world the exact same way.

Heres the key insight: Hunter believes that the total dominance progressives have in the culture-making institutions of our society means that their vision is going to win in the long run. One last bit from the Journal piece:

Yet he doubts that reason and science are any better suited than fundamentalist religion to provide a stable basis for morality, even if the West continues to secularize. One challenge of the Enlightenment he says, is that reason gave us the power to doubt and to question everything, including reason itself. That throws us back upon our own subjectivity. ... You have your truth, I have mine.

This is important for a couple of reasons.

First, the victory of progressives in the culture war will not bring peace, because it cannot bring peace. Religious and moral conservatives may well be sidelined in defeat, but that only means that the culture war will rage on other fronts. As Hunter avers, there is no way to settle these issues absent a shared source of cultural authority. Dont forget Ross Douthats warning: if you dont like the Religious Right, wait until you see the Post-Religious Right.

Second, its important that conservatives understand that because politics is downstream from culture, we are going to lose in politics, eventually. You only have to look at the polls on what Millennials believe and dont believe to see that. And if orthodox Christian beliefs are a barrier to full participation in the middle and upper middle class, then a lot of people are going to cast them aside.

We conservative Christians ought to be preparing ourselves and our children for this eventuality. When being a Christian costs us something in terms of social access, professional success, and economic prosperity, then we are going to see far fewer Christians. If there are far fewer Christians, the plausibility of the Christian faith is going to be much less. This is going to have a substantial impact on the ability of Christian parents to pass the faith along to their children. Whether we consciously retreat from the public square or not, we are going to be moved out.

And we are going to be moved out because a lot of the younger generation of Christians is going to be doing the pushing. As Daniel Cox pointed out:

Nearly half (48 percent) of white evangelical Protestants under 30 say that their church should adjust traditional beliefs and practices or adopt modern beliefs and practices.

As for young Catholics, huge numbers of them are leaving the church entirely, and those who remain disagree with their church strongly on issues where church teaching conflicts with the Sexual Revolution.

This is the world we are in now, and the world shortly to come, as I argue in The Benedict Option. A lot of Christians living inside Christian bubbles dont want to see it. Heres an extreme, but popular, example. Recently I became aware of the Trump prophecy, something that a Florida firefighter said God told him in 2011. Theres a feature film about it coming out this fall, produced in part with Liberty University. Below is the alleged prophecy:

Full Text of Mark Taylors April 28,2011Trump Prophecy:

The Spirit of God says Ive chosen this man Donald Trump for such a time as this. For as Benjamin Netanyahu is to Israel, so shall this man be to the United States of America, for I will use this man to bring honor, respect and restoration to America. America will be respected once again as the most powerful, prosperous nation on Earth other than Israel. The dollar will be the strongest it has ever been in the history of the United States and will once again be the currency by which all others are judged. The Spirit of God says the enemy will quake and shake, and fear this man I have anointed. They will even quake and shake when he announces he is running for President. It will be like the shot heard across the world. Then you will say what shall we do now? This man knows all our tricks and schemes. Weve been robbing America for decades. What should we do to stop this? The Spirit says, ha, no one shall stop this that I have started, for the enemy has stolen from America for decades and it stops now. For I will use this man to reap the harvest that the United States has sown for and plunder from the enemy what he has stolen, and return it back sevenfold to the United States. The enemy will say, Israel, Israel, what about Israel? Israel will be protected by America once again. The Spirit says yes, America will once again stand hand in hand with Israel and the two shall be as one, for the ties between Israel and America will be stronger than ever and Israel will flourish like never before. The Spirit of God says I will protect America and Israel, for this next President will be a man of his word. When he speaks the world will listen and know that there is something greater in him than all the others before him. This mans word is his bond and the world and America will know this, and the enemy will fear this, for this man will be fearless. The Spirit says when the financial harvest begins so shall the parallel in the spiritual for America. The Spirit of God says in this next election they will spend billions to keep this president out. It will be like money down the toilet. Let them waste their money, for where it comes from is being used by evil forces at work, but they will not succeed. This next election will be a clean sweep for the man that I have chosen. They will say things about this man, the enemy, but it will not affect him and they will say it rolls off of him like a duck. For even as the feathers of a duck protect it, so shall my feathers protect this next president. Even mainstream news media will be captivated by this man and the abilities that I gift to him and they will even begin to agree with him, says the Spirit.

The self-deceiving triumphalist fantasy here Donald Trump as secular savior and sower of the seeds of Christian revival is gobsmacking. That so many Christians are eager to believe this is a sign of how desperate our position has become. According to this prophecy, having voted for Trump, America will be great again, rich again, powerful again, and will experience a spiritual revival.

It is easier for a lot of Christians to believe this Big Rock Candy #MAGA nonsense, this dream of restoration, than it is to prepare themselves and their children for the realities of life in exile.

James Davison Hunter published a book back in 2010, To Change The World, in which he considers how Christians can live faithfully in a post-Christian world. The book was quite good in its diagnosis of the problem, but failed to provide any clear prescription. This is understandable; its very hard to figure out how to do this. The point is, though, that we had better get serious, real fast, about trying.

UPDATE: Reader Michael GC:

I came across this quote from James Davison Hunter the other day in an article discussing the ramifications of the pending Masterpiece Cakeshop Supreme Court decision, and found it so notable that I saved it:

The capacity of a social group or movement to make its particular preferences and practices seem natural is the key to its control; these particularities become standard throughout society while shrouded in a cloak of neutrality.

The key to its control. The standard of marriage is now such that two men wanting a wedding cake is so natural that why would anyone in their right mind even pause to think twice about it? Just make the cake and shut up! Whats wrong with you anyway?

For us donkeys on this Animal Farm who are stubborn about relinquishing their memories to fall for the favored lie of the moment, time for decision will be upon us. Do we say what we know and lose status or play along for our livelihood and our childrens well-being? There is another option, the Benedict one. It has to be; otherwise, even when we win, well lose. Consider the Boy Scouts of America (now just Scouts, BSA). They won their case legally but surrendered to the culture, regardless.

More:
Culture Wars: Where Are We Now? | The American Conservative

Wearing a mask is one of the easiest ways to contribute to the fight against coronavirus.

Infected people wearing masks are less likely to spray virus-containing droplets onto others, which means that universal mask-wearing should, in theory, make everyone safer. Theres some evidence from across the world that suggests the widespread use of masks has played a role in reducing coronavirus transmission. Studies on mask-wearing generally support it, finding that masks generally provide at least some protection. At worst, masks are a low-cost intervention that might help at the margins.

But in recent weeks, mask-wearing in the United States has become another flashpoint in the partisan culture wars.

President Trump refuses to wear a mask in public appearances including one at a factory that produces masks or in his office, despite a recent outbreak among the White House staff. Vice President Mike Pence opted not to wear one when he visited the Mayo Clinic, a prominent medical facility in Minnesota thats treating coronavirus patients. Many Republicans in Congress have opted not to wear masks on the House and Senate floors, despite several members of their caucus testing positive for the illness earlier this spring.

People tend to take signals from their political leadership, and rank-and-file Republicans appear to have gotten the message. New research from three political scientists Syracuses Shana Gadarian, UC-Irvines Sara Goodman, and Cornells Tom Pepinsky analyzed polling data on over 2,400 Americans attitudes and self-reported behaviors during the pandemic. They find that, after controlling for a full set of confounding variables, partisanship is a fairly strong predictor of ones likelihood of wearing a mask.

Democrats are more than 20 percentage points more likely than Republicans to (75% versus 53%) to report wearing masks in public, Pepinsky writes in a blog post summarizing their findings. Mask-wearing levels are consistently lower across the board in states that voted strongly for Trump.

Why would Republicans treat masks as a partisan issue?

A series of tweets from R.R. Reno, the editor of the conservative religious magazine First Things, is clarifying: In a diatribe that went viral on Tuesday night for all the wrong reasons, Reno praised Trump for failing to wear a mask when meeting a group of World War II veterans and went on to describe the very idea of masks as a kind of surrender:

Reno has written a lot of goofy stuff during the coronavirus epidemic. But what hes saying here tells us a lot about the rights approach to coronavirus more broadly.

The first thing that leaps out is that the anti-mask crusade reflects a particular vision of masculinity. Renos reframing of an obvious public health measure as a kind of cowardice, something tough World War II veterans would never do, is a thinly veiled way of calling protective masks unmanly. As my colleague Anna North argues, this strain of anxious masculinity is a consistent theme in anti-mask arguments on the right.

The second is the argument that mask-wearing is a form of political correctness. Renos reasoning is incoherent if youre willing to visit your mother, presumably you should take mask-wearing even more seriously but it illustrates the category of thinking hes relying on here. The question in his mind is not does wearing a mask contribute to public health, but rather what does wearing a mask say about where I stand in the culture war. He sees the issue not through the lens of substance, but of symbolism.

When you look at the broader Republican response to masks through the lens of Renos thinking, it starts to make a lot more sense. This is a political movement that has been built to wage a culture war; it has no greater objective than owning the libs. And the best way to own them is to defeat them in combat over identity: gender, race, sexuality, and the like.

The war on masks is a way of taking a public health crisis a situation that demands political unity and best practices in governance and reshaping it into a culture war competition. The question is not are we doing a good job handling this so much as whose team do you want to be on, the namby-pamby liberals or the strong fearless conservatives?

It is difficult for members of the modern organized conservative movement to see political issues outside the lenses of partisanship and the culture wars. At a time when unity on public health matters is paramount, on issues ranging from masks to testing to the timing of reopening, this is dangerous.

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Trump, coronavirus, and the partisan culture war over masks - Vox.com

HOBART, Australia Until four months ago few leaders seemed more influenced even inspired by President Trumps worldview than Australias prime minister, Scott Morrison.

Mr. Morrisons government was climate-denying, globalism-bashing and displayed an increasingly authoritarian bent. His rhetoric, even if it lacked the sriracha of Trumpetry, riffed on Trumpian themes.

And given a good crisis, Mr. Morrisons administration seemed as determined as the White House to miss no opportunity to make matters worse as it did with its grossly inept response to Australias summer of apocalyptic wild fires.

Having seen this almost impossibly low bar set for government action, many Australians have felt relief tinged with astonishment knowing that their country is today among the worlds most successful in dealing with the coronavirus epidemic. By some measures, it nearly rivals South Korea and has done better than Singapore and Germany.

As of Monday morning, Australia, with its 25.5 million people, had recorded a total of 7,054 infections and 99 deaths, according to Worldometers. Thats 277 infections and four deaths for every million people. In the United States, the per capita figures were 4,619 infections and 275 deaths per million by Monday; in Britain, 3,592 infections and 511 deaths per million.

What happened?

According to Mr. Morrisons treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, the former prime minister John Howard, the eminence grise of Australian conservatism and its many culture wars, counseled Mr. Morrison and Mr. Frydenberg that theres no ideological constraints at times like this. Mr. Frydenberg added, Thats the advice we have taken. Mr. Morrison went so far as to declare: Today is not about ideologies. We checked those at the door.

Mr. Howard spoke from experience. A fiercely right-wing prime minister, when confronted in 1996 with the horror of 35 people being shot dead at Port Arthur, in Tasmania, he moved decisively to enact strong gun-control laws. No mass shootings occurred in the next 20 years, according to a 2016 report, and the decline in firearm deaths accelerated. There have been only two mass shootings since, one of seven people and one of four.

Following Mr. Morrisons own Damascene moment, things once deemed fantastical became commonplace. Scientists, whom Mr. Morrisons party has derided for over a decade, were respectfully asked for their views about the novel coronavirus and, more remarkable still, these views were acted on and amplified. Mr. Morrison dismissed the idea of trying to build herd immunity among the population, calling it a death sentence.

A national cabinet was formed in which the states premiers (the equivalent of governors) from both the left and the right regularly met by video to plot the course of the nation through the crisis. In this way and others, a government that has been sectarian and divisive became inclusive.

The stimulus plan was designed after negotiations with various civil society groups, including the trade unions. There are no blue teams or red teams, Mr. Morrison said in early April. There are no more unions or bosses. There are just Australians now; thats all that matters.

He thanked Sally McManus, the first woman to head Australias trade union movement a socialist and feminist, a bte noire of the right and to the left of the Labor Party mainstream, Ms. McManus is an activist who allies her politics with the likes of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.

It was a moment of grace, and as surreal as if Mr. Trump sought the counsel of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and then praised her.

As a consequence of the stimulus, the Australian economy is not expected to plumb the catastrophic depths foreseen for the United States or Europe. The unemployment rate rose to 6.2 percent in April. The Reserve Bank of Australia has predicted that it will peak at 10 percent in June and slowly decline to 6.5 percent by June 2022. While these sad statistics hide a larger tragedy, they still are preferable to those in the United States, where unemployment hit 14.7 percent last month and, according to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, may have reached 25 percent.

Australians trust in their government has soared from record lows in December: Ninety-three percent of respondents in a recent poll by the Lowy Institute said they believed it had handled Covid-19 very or fairly well. Peter Doherty, a leading Australian immunologist and Nobel laureate who on Twitter rails against neoliberal idiocy and Mr. Trump, spoke for many Australians when he said recently that Mr. Morrison had, in dealing with the pandemic, basically done the right thing.

And yet Australias success has received little global attention.

New Zealands prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, struts the world stage, leading in scores of stories about countries that are succeeding against the coronavirus, exuding charisma, but charisma excludes Mr. Morrison, who seems condemned to watch from the wings.

Could it be that Australias record somehow embarrasses commentators of both the left and the right? The left, because the Australian government is in every other respect Trumpian in its male-led, climate-denying, nationalist tub-thumping and authoritarian sentiments; the right because a conservative government has succeeded only by very publicly abandoning ideology. And if ideology, and the culture wars, are nothing when everything is at stake, the inevitable question arises: Did they ever mean anything at all?

Now, with the beginning of a return to normalcy, the strange miracle of this Australian consensus already is starting to vanish, with old habits renascent.

Even so, these remarkable few months will remain a rebuke to the murderous madness of ruling through division, a testament of hope to all that can be achieved when ideology is ditched.

Presented with growing doubts about democracys ability to deal with the pandemic on the one hand, and the seeming ability of a totalitarian China to address the crisis on the other, Australia unexpectedly, if only briefly, returned to its best traditions of communality and fairness.

While the world searches for a vaccine for the virus, the vaccine for its coming crises not least among them climate change is perhaps hiding in plain sight: unite, listen and act with all, for all, rather than special interests. Perhaps this is the future, the only future, and not just for Australia, but for any democracy seeking to hold through this new, terrifying age.

Richard Flanagan won the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North and is the author, most recently, of the novel First Person.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Did the Coronavirus Kill Ideology in Australia? - The New York Times

Its a truism that there are at least two sides to every argument. But it does not necessarily follow that those two sides are equal either in substantive weight or public appeal.

These pages and our television screens, to say nothing of social media, are chock full of clashes over the pace of reopenings, mask mandates and all manner of issues related to this phase of the COVID public health response.

Fortunately, most of these are wars of words only, fully in keeping with our rich American tradition of free speech and public dissension. But, increasingly, words are being replaced by actions, whether in the form of restaurants defying closure orders, gun-toting protesters showing up at state capitol buildings, or unveiled Facebook threats of civil war.

Fear is powerful and pandemics across the ages have not always brought out the best in human charity and compassion. In the face of a deadly, invisible contagion, and with the best defense being to keep others at a distance, me has often triumphed over we.

Further, this response requires patience a quality that is not always a hallmark of our society.

The word most often recited in these protests, both the actual gatherings and the rhetorical grenades, is tyranny. Which the dictionary defines as cruel or oppressive government or rule.

That is such an exaggerated claim, unfounded on the merits and counterproductive as a political message.

There is no questioning on this end of the economic metrics or the individual stories of devastation. Those of us who are more comfortable and less susceptible to this upheaval need to understand the breadth of the economic loss and the depth of the personal pain.

(On that score, an acknowledgement. In a column early in this crisis, I critiqued the cure is worse than the disease line of thinking and commented that the economic rebound could be just as dramatic as the downturn. Ill have to assign that erroneous assessment to wishful thinking as there is less doubt with each passing week that it will take a good while to dig out of this economic hole. Some sectors will regain strength faster than others but the notion of a sharp, V-shaped recovery is less and less likely.)

However deep and damaging the economic consequences, the causation rests with the virus, not with government actions much less tyranny. It is the pathogen that is dictating the economic havoc. To instead, conveniently, blame the public response is wildly off the mark.

Whatever the political differences, show me one governor or mayor who wants the economy to tank and tax coffers to dry up.

Ironically and sadly, those who are making a show of violating public health orders are serving to extend the closures and shutdowns instead of cutting them short. Think, for instance, of the less-than-stellar crowd gathered close together sans masks on Mothers Day at the now-shuttered bakery in Castle Rock. Did that moment of feel-good independence and sticking-it-to-the-man lessen the spread of the virus or risk greater proliferation?

Of course, government action should be put under a microscope. That is especially true in extraordinary circumstances when such emergency response exceeds usual bounds. Not all policies have equal backing or impact. For example, mask requirements have demonstrated upside in closed, indoor places even if they are far from a total preventative. In an outdoor setting of abundant space, any benefit is quite marginal.

But, again, it is the disease that is in the drivers seat, not the decrees. Take Jared Polis completely out of the equation and I dare say that darn few of us would be sitting in a packed restaurant or movie theater or ballpark or concert hall anytime soon.

To the politics, public opinion is simply not with those on the front lines of protest and outrage. Polling in Colorado and across the country shows that even among Republicans, mask requirements and a slower approach to reopenings are favored by margins upward of two-to-one. Among Democrats and unaffiliated voters, the margins are even higher.

We are a nation perpetually and angrily divided. But on this issue at least, that divide is far from equal.

By training and instinct, reporters tend to give equivalent weight to both sides of the argument. One paragraph pro; one paragraph con. Thats fair but loses sight of indicator after indicator showing public sentiment solidly behind bold action to safeguard public health.

For further evidence, look at the political fortunes of governors of both parties who have moved aggressively on the COVID crisis versus those who have been more timid and laissez faire. Among Democratic governors, Polis has embraced cautious resumptions on a faster timeline than most of his peers.

Culture wars require culture warriors. In this case, often fanned by presidential tweets, the call has been answered by libertarian-leaning conservatives. Their conundrum is that their populist cries of tyranny lack popular resonance.

This has led to a rhetorical escalation that is more and more out of sync with a guarded and frightened public. A week ago, one Denver radio talker, seemingly reasonable and personable off-air, equated mask mandates with Holocaust-era orders for Jews to wear a yellow star on their chest. The fact that this radio personality lost ancestors to the Nazi madness, as did my family, made the analogy no less wacky and off-key.

Add to this my usual rule of politics that whichever side first reaches for the Nazi card is most often losing the argument.

With a highly contagious virus already ripping at our fabric, perhaps it is extra important to be careful with the discourse and not do more to tear ourselves apart. Instead of one more political and cultural flashpoint, might this historic challenge be a healing touchpoint?

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. His column appears regularly on Sundays in ColoradoPolitics. Reach him atEWS@EricSondermann.com; follow him at @EricSondermann

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SONDERMANN | Blame the virus, not the government | News - coloradopolitics.com

His wife, Virginia Thomas, gets a bit of screen time, but shes totally in sync with her husbands version of history and the events in his life. If you want a 2-hour production that feels more like hagiography than what I think of as a documentary with balancing voices, then Created Equal is for you. The question is whether such a one-sided, in his own words version of the life of a figure as controversial as Thomas is what public television should be offering in prime time. The answer to that question goes straight to the heart of our culture wars. Clarence Thomas and Michael Pack, the films director and producer, bring plenty of culture war baggage with them to the table.

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If you want a one-sided, right-wing, celebratory version of the life of Clarence Thomas, PBS has just the tic - Baltimore Sun